
GopyrightN 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

Meditations on the Apostles' Creed, nmo, 
531 pages $2.00 net. 



Christian's Day. A Book of Meditations. 
257 pages $1.50 net. 

Meditations on the Office and Work of the 
Holy Spirit. 257 pages $1.50 net. 



The Self-Revelation of 
Our Lord. 



BY 1^3-^ 

THE REVEREND J. G. H. BARRY, D.D. 



SECOND EDITION 
Revised and Corrected. 



EDWIN S. GORHAM, PUBLISHER 
37 EAST 28TH ST. 
1914. 
(I) 



2,^2-05 



Copyright 

BY 

Edwin S. Gorham 
1013 



MAY 28 1914 



©CLA376089 



To The 
Rt. Rev. William Walter Wrbh, D.D. 
Bishop of Milwaukee. 



My Dear Bishop : 

I have not asked your permission to dedicate this 
volume to you : I am presuming on our long friend- 
ship, and your constant and unfailing kindness of 
which I have had continuous experience since our 
Seminary days. Your permission not having been 
asked, you will be in nowise responsible for any of 
my utterances. I have tried in these pages to ex- 
press some of the fundamental truths of the Chris- 
tian Faith, and to apply them in the light of an ex- 
perience now covering many years. You will find 
nothing new here. I have no novel theories to put 
forth. My only hope is that by the reading of 
these Meditations some few souls may be led to a 
deeper devotion to our Blessed Lord. That is the 
end of your work, too : and in it I wish you all hap- 
piness and prosperity. 

I am, with abiding regard and affection, 
Yours, in our Lord, 

J. G. H. Barry. 



CONTENTS. 

I. I Am i 

II. I Am the Way 29 

III. I Am the Truth 53 

IV. I Am the Life 81 

V. I Am the Living Bread 109 

VI. I Am the Door 133 

VII. I Am the Good Shepherd .... 161 

VIII. I Am the Vine 189 

IX. I Am the Light of the World . . .217 

X. I Am the Resurrection and the Life . . 247 

XL I Am He That Liveth and Was Dead . . 275 

XII. I Am Alpha and Omega 305 



I AM. 

Let us listen to the Words of our Lord — 

I Am. 
Let us picture to ourselves — 

H SCENE that most of us have witnessed 
more than once — the dying of a human 
being. Here is one who has come to the 
end of mortal life. He has always known that this 
was to come to him, that sometime he should lie 
dying, and yet for the greater part of his existence 
he has managed to ignore it. He has put this 
thought of death away from him, not because it 
was a doubtful thing, but because it was a disagree- 
able thing. Even Christians whose theory it is that 
death is just the passing from mortality unto life, 
do that. But now the thing itself, death, is here ; it 
is no longer possible to ignore it; the soul is actu- 
ally passing from the body. It is going — where? 

1 

(2) 



2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Has the man who lies here any ''where" to go to? 
Has he constructed any ''where" that he goes to- 
ward with confidence and joy? The meaning of 
his life has been, not that it should end in the going 
forth of his soul to conditions unknown and inde- 
termined, but that he should live on under condi- 
tions that he has himself, in a way created. There 
is no uncertainty about death — it comes. There is 
no uncertainty about the state of the soul after 
death ; it will be what it was before. We may not be 
able to read all the indications, but the man himself 
knows what, for the future, he has laid hold on; 
what of sustaining faith he has to support him in 
this hour. He is going out under conditions that 
he himself has controlled. What he will meet, is 
what he has prepared himself to meet. 

Consider, first — 

That the thing that gives certainty to the future 
and removes all fear and terror from the dying of 
any man, is the teaching of Jesus Christ. Blot out 
that teaching from the human consciousness, and 
what have you left ? Do all the philosophic lectures 
that strive to establish a possibility or probability of 
survival of death by the human soul give you any 
comfort ? Do all the experimental investigations of 
Psychical Research, the alleged recalling of the dead 
to write or speak platitudes or nonsense through 



I AM $ 

mediums, console you as to the future? All the 
talk of the probability of a blessed and happy future 
that people who do not believe in Christianity in- 
dulge in, what is it other than poetic optimism? 
What really gives a note of hopefulness to the 
speculations of non-Christians is the teaching of 
Jesus Christ that lingers, as the echo lingers after 
the voice that produced it is silent, where belief in 
Jesus himself has died — lingers, because of all his 
teaching that is the one thing that men would cling 
to, that they do not perish in the grave. But there 
is a vast practical difference between the hope of 
immortality and the certainty of it. There is end- 
less distance, as affects life, between the speculation 
that we may survive death, and the certainty that 
we shall not only survive, but that the nature of our 
future is determined by the nature of our past. It 
is the difference between those early voyagers who 
set out to discover unknown lands and most likely 
perished at the end of a successful quest, because 
they were ignorant of the preparations needful to 
meet the condition of life the new land offered, and. 
the modern traveller who, even when exploring un- 
known lands knows before he starts the conditions 
for which he must prepare. We go out on no un- 
known quest, for we have the teaching of Christ to n 
guide us, and shall have the Presence of Christ -Jo*. 
meet and sustain us. 



4 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Consider, second — 

The calm security with which the saint faces 
death is due to his conviction that our Lord is a liv- 
ing Saviour on whom he may confidently lean in 
this, his last earthly hour. That is, our confidence in 
death rests in our belief in the Godhead of our 
Lord. It is not simply that he has told us of the 
issues of death and we believe him ; it is not simply 
that he has gone before us in the path that we must 
tread, and awaits to meet us at its end ; but that by 
his divine power he sustains us in that path, and 
awaits us to reveal himself more completely. Blot 
out our Lord's divinity and you have by that act 
blotted out the authority of his teaching and his 
power to help. We find it possible to rely on him 
in the supreme crisis, when all the accustomed helps 
fail us, when the earth fades from our sight and the 
support of human hands is broken, because we have 
experienced him as Divine. That calm assertion of 
his Godhead, I am ; I, amid a world the fashion of 
which changes and whose form perishes, I am, I, 
.eternal, unchangeable, the same, yesterday, to-day, 
and forever; that is the foundation on which I can 
:rest my life. All the interpretations of Jesus turn 
out empty illusions, powerless to affect life, except 
that which declares him God of God, Light of 
1 Light, Very God of Very God. Let us rest a mo- 



I AM 5 

ment in that thought, prostrating our souls before 
him and worshipping him who is at once "God of 
the substance of his Father begotten before the 
world, and man of the substance of his mother, 
born in the world." Because he is this, he can take 
us through death. 

Let us, then, pray — 

For a clearer apprehension of his Godhead. 
Pray, that faith in that Godhead may never fail us. 
Pray that it may sustain us in the hour of our death. 

May the Infinite and Ineffable Trinity, the 
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, direct our life 
in good works, and after our passage through this 
world vouchsafe to us eternal rest with the right- 
eous. Grant this, O Eternal and Almighty God, 
through Thy Divine Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

As we read our Gospels we cannot help but notice 
that there is in our Lord's assertions about Himself 
the claim to a power and knowledge that is more 
than human. Again and again his words assume 
that he is in the possession of the powers of the 
Godhead. And often when this assumption is not 
expressed in words we perceive it as being neces- 
sarily involved in what he says and does. It is not 
that he does "mighty works"; we have ceased to 
look on miracles as the characteristic expression of 



O THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

divinity; it is rather that his self-consciousness is 
that of one perfectly united to God. After we have 
studied our Lord's words with sufficient clearness 
to have become familiar with his forms of self-ex- 
pression, we are not surprised to hear him say, "I 
and my Father are one." The acute ears of Jew- 
ish critics caught the meaning of his self-assertion 
and had no doubt that "he being man made himself 
equal to God.'' Their charge of blasphemy was 
perfectly well grounded unless we are able to take 
the point of view which they declined, that his self- 
assertion was true. This man rests on God in a 
special way which is quite different from the way 
in which the great Prophets had rested on him. 
Their relation to God was a relation of faith : Jesus' 
relation to God is a relation of identity. Apolo- 
gists used to quote this or that text of the New 
Testament in proof of our Lord's divinity. But we 
have learned that such a method is altogether too 
narrow and mechanical a way of treating the fact. 
The true ground that we find in the gospels for 
holding that our Lord is divine is not an act or ex- 
pression here and there which seems almost acci- 
dentally to reveal a secret that he is carefully keep- 
ing but the very nature of his self-consciousness 
which is the self-consciousness of God. When bis 
teaching compels him to self-assertion, it is the self- 
assertion of God. 



I AM 7 

The characteristic form of this self-assertion is 
found in these sayings that I am asking you to med- 
itate upon — these "I ams" of our Lord, as they 
have been called. They are passages of self-defini- 
tion, and such "I am" is the assumption of divine 
attributes. If we make the attempt to construe them 
as the assertions of a man they become absurd or, 
as the Jews thought them blasphemous. There is 
no sense in which one who is merely man can say: 
"I am the Living Bread that came down from hea- 
ven; if a man eat of this Bread he shall live for- 
ever." Still more difficult to make anything of is 
such a saying as this: "I am the Resurrection and 
the Life." We have only to put one of these say- 
ings into the mouth of, say, St. Paul, and imagine 
him saying to his disciples, "I am the Good Shep- 
herd; the Good Shepherd giveth his life for his 
sheep, ,, to understand the uniqueness of the person- 
ality that can make use of such words in relation to 
himself. And in this saying that we are presently 
concerned with, "I am", — "before Abraham was, I 
am" — there is the ring of divinity — or insanity. 

In the Incarnation there is a hiding of the divine 
power. But it cannot be hid always; there are 
times when it will break forth. Our Lord acts 
through the humanity which he has assumed, keep- 
ing in check, if one may use such an expression, so 
much of his divinity as human nature will not meJi- 



8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ate. The humanity is a medium of transmission up 
to a certain point ; but beyond that it ceases to be a 
fit instrument for the divine. What the "certain 
point" is, we are not competent to say. Our Lord's 
divinity sustains and vivifies his humanity which by 
its union with his person is thus brought into con- 
tact with the source of spiritual life. But when it 
comes to his teaching, to his authority, the divine 
shines out. In his miracles there is no necessary 
expression of the divine power ; but in his teaching 
he goes beyond man and teaches as man never 
taught. It is teaching that is mediated through the 
humanity; but it is beyond the power of humanity 
to originate, it implies an extra-human experience, 
the experience of God. His teaching has not the 
accent of philosophical speculation, inferences as to 
the mind of God ; but is the assertion of direct, self- 
originated knowledge, — the knowledge of one who 
speaks, not from God, but as God. There is no 
shade of suspicion in him that his words are less 
than final and complete truth. There is in his 
words no, "I think," "I infer," "I conclude," "I be- 
lieve'' ; it is always the direct and simple affirma- 
tion of truth that admits of no doubt. The wood- 
land may be as dense as you please, the path you 
wander through on a Summer morning may have 
all the qualities of twilight, the closely woven 
branches of the pine shutting out the sun. But 



I AM 9 

there will always be places where the weaving is 
thin, where the light filters through and forms danc- 
ing nets of gold on the brown needles of the pine 
that strew the paths. So these sayings of our Lord 
— they are revealing lights breaking through the 
twilight of humanity and manifesting the divine 
presence. In them we see God. 

"Before Abraham was, I am;'' he declares his 
timelessness, his eternal existence, his essential di- 
vinity; that divinity that his beloved disciple sets 
out in the prologue of his Gospel, that those who 
read might approach the narrative that follows 
with adequate understanding of the person whose 
life he was to tell ; "In the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God, and the Word was 
God." There are those who tell us that such ques- 
tions are unimportant and only perplex us. That 
it is enough that our Lord taught us of the Father 
and set us an example that we might follow him. 
But before I can accept any man's example as con- 
straining to my life, I need to know his right, his 
authority, to make himself an example at all. An 
example that appeals to me is one thing, an authori- 
tative example is another. But this, it is replied, is 
an example which we all recognize as embodying the 
highest and best that humanity knows. All men 
feel its constraining power and that power is not in- 
creased, but the simplicity of its appeal is detracted 



IO THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

from, by complicating it with questions that con- 
cern the nature of Christ's person. All men are not 
able to believe the divinity of his person, but all 
men feel the perfectness of his example. Why hin- 
der them in following the one, by imposing on them 
beliefs in regard to the other? 

To which this is the plain answer; that it is not 
true that all men feel the beauty of Christ's exam- 
ple and are constrained to follow it; that they 
recognize his teaching, considered as the teaching 
of a pure and holy man, as the perfect guide of life. 
That teaching is being increasingly repudiated to- 
day; and repudiated, not as it always has been, by 
those who prefer a life of sin and throw off the re- 
straint of the Gospel without denying its perfect- 
ness; but by those who explicitly deny its perfect- 
ness, its suitability to man in our time, its expres- 
sion of the best that humanity is capable of. The 
denial of the divinity of our Lord, coupled with the 
assertion of the sufficiency and binding character of 
his human example, so far from removing stum- 
bling blocks from men's ways and making it easy 
for them to unite on a program of right living, 
has resulted in the repudiation of the authoritative 
character of Christian morals, and the perfection 
of the human life of our Lord. After a period of 
theological chaos during which men have consoled 
themselves by saying that after all it did not mat- 



I AM i I 

ter how confused and contradictory our beliefs 
might be, because we were all, in any case, agreed 
on the meaning of a right life, and that his creed 
could not really be wrong whose life is in the right; 
we have entered upon a period of moral chaos in 
which the distinction between right and wrong 
tends to lose all meaning. A man's morals to-day 
are regarded as what we were told in the last gen- 
eration his theology was, his private affair. Not 
long ago a man declined to give up his mistress at 
my urging, not on the ground that he could not 
break away from sin, but on the ground that the 
relation was a perfectly legitimate one and his own 
private business, with which the Church, whose 
absolution he was seeking, had no right to inter- 
fere. This attitude is typical ; and we have not to 
read very far in modern literature to find it wide- 
spread. Why should we, indeed, submit to have 
all our lives regulated, and our business and our 
pleasure interfered with, by the teaching of a. man 
who lived in Palestine some centuries ago? 

The pressing question is not : Did our Lord teach 
a theology ? but, had he authority to teach anything 
whatsoever? Has his word any binding force? Is 
the twentieth century, which respects nothing else, 
bound to respect the ideals of life which are em- 
bodied in the teaching and living of Jesus? I do 
not know what answer those who have been con- 



12 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ducting an anti-theological campaign in the interest 
of what they call "religion" may have to give; but 
whatever their answer may be, it is clearly not im- 
pressing the world, which drifts on to ever more 
explicit repudiation of moral restraint. The only ef- 
fective barrier to the incoming flood of a moralism 
seems to be the reassertion of our Lord's author- 
ity to teach, based on the assertion of his divinity. 
Why accept Christ's teaching? Because he speaks 
with the authority of God, — of a God before whose 
judgment seat we shall all one day have to stand. 
Others have spoken persuasive words out of their 
own deep spiritual experience of God; but he 
alone speaks from "the Bosom of the Father." 
"The Only Begotten Son who is in the Bosom of 
the Father," he has declared "The Father and the 
Father's will." He can declare the mind and will 
of God with complete authority because in doing 
so he is declaring his own mind and will. His 
word is final. 

It is because of our Lord's divinity, then, that we 
have confidence in his word. We read our Gos- 
pels in a mood that differs entirely from that in 
which we read any other book of spiritual teaching. 
We read the books of to-day that are devoted to the 
exposition of the Christian life with a constant, it 
may be half unconscious, reference of their teach- 
ing to the teaching of our Lord. No other book is 



I AM 13 

final for us. No other book, therefore, can take 
the place in our spiritual training of the Gospel. 
And his authority extends to his work ; in that, too, 
we find an expression of his mind. If we learn 
spiritual truth from the parable we learn it not less 
from the miracle which is an embodiment of teach- 
ing, a parable in action. Indeed, looking at his 
work, meaning by that, not this or that act, but the 
whole process of his living and dying — his Incar- 
nation, his Atoning death, his Resurrection, Ascen- 
sion, Session — we see that what he says (his teach- 
ing in a narrow sense) is strictly dependent for its 
significance and power upon what he does. His 
word may, and doubtless does, take us farther into 
the heart of reality than that of any other teacher. 
But even that word is powerless apart from his 
work. It has the same sort of powerlessness as the 
word of any other teacher. We need to persuade 
ourselves of the powerlessness of knowledge. It 
has been the ideal of the rationalistic education to 
which we have been subjected that "knowledge is 
power," that the training of the intellectual part 
of our nature is all-sufficient to fit us to meet the 
problems of life. We have only to open our eyes 
to the facts of experience to know that that is not 
true. How many men do we know who have 
knowledge, but not wisdom — who are notably un- 
wise in dealing with the problems of life. There 



14 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

are constant examples of men whose knowledge we 
should not dispute, who are incompetent to deal 
with the problems of family life, — who cannot suc- 
ceed in the discipline and training of a child. The 
higher education does not exempt men and women 
from the assaults of passion, or render them im- 
mune to pride and covetousness. The accumula- 
tion of knowledge seems in no degree to teach the 
art of living a successful social life, to say noth- 
ing of a life of righteousness. There is evidently 
something vital lacking to knowledge as a guide to 
life. What is that something? Just what know- 
ledge, proverbially is and actually is not — power. It 
is power that we want and must in somewise get in 
independence of knowledge — from some other 
source. And it is not even our Lord's teaching, 
which no doubt gives us knowledge, that can sup- 
ply the power. His teaching succeeds in setting 
before us a higher example than any other teaching, 
in putting us under the pressure of a higher ideal — 
but what then? Why, we find ourselves confront- 
ed with an impossible theory of life. There is 
nothing in knowledge that can enable it to lay hold 
upon, and vivify nature, and develop it to a higher 
capacity of action. 

Are we hopeless, then, in the presence of high 
ideals of Christian living? Are we to find the life 
of Christ a discouragement rather than stimulus? 



I AM 15 

Surely there is that danger unless we can find in 
our Lord, not only an example of a godly life, but 
also the source of it. It is his work in becoming 
one with us, and thus giving life to us, that inspires 
our hope. "To them gave he the right to become 
the sons of God" — a right which is exercised, not 
by some more or less feeble imitation of moral qual- 
ities, but in that self-surrender to his Incarnate 
action which results in our Regeneration and Sanc- 
tification. We do not grow up, out of him, imita- 
ting him ; but we grow up, in him, expressing him. 
"As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are 
the sons of God"; as many, that is, as are respon- 
sive to the motions to the spiritual life, as distin- 
guished from those who respond to the motives of 
the world. It is they who lay hold upon the eter- 
nal life, imperishable things which are the inherit- 
ance of God's children. 

One of the distinguishing marks of sanctity is 
that it seeks for stability of life, trying to get be- 
yond the temporality "of the things that are seen," 
to the eternity of the "things that are not seen/' 
Such stability it finds when it discovers the re- 
sources of the sonship which belongs to those who 
are in union with God. Herein is found a relation 
which is permanent, and upon which we may build 
for eternity. The possible acquisitions of charac- 
ter, as we build it up in this world, fall easily into 



1 6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

two classes ; those which are so related to and so de- 
pendent upon the things of time that they must per- 
ish with them ; and those which have deeper roots 
and are so related to ultimate spiritual reality that 
they will persist while the Spirit persists. There 
is no permanency in material acquisitions and the 
pleasures that grow out of them. There is no per- 
manency in such ambitions as are gratified by the 
possession of worldly power and influence. There 
is no permanency in a friendship growing out of a 
community of temporal interests, or in a love which 
is the product of sensual desires. Any human in- 
terests to have permanency must be capable of being, 
and must actually be, lifted to the level of spiritual 
action and transformed by drawing their life and 
energy from God. Such qualities as our Lord ex- 
emplifies in his own life and makes the substance 
of his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount; such 
qualities as St. Paul teaches to be the fruits of the 
Spirit ; — these are permanent and undying. In this 
world we can love and use material things, we can 
be absorbed in earthly affections, we can saturate 
our senses in the enjoyment of the gifts life so 
richly brings ; and in great measure we can do this 
in helpful and innocent ways ; in great measure we 
are obliged to do some of these by the very condi- 
tion of our life. But we can, and if we seek an- 
other life must, sit loose to such joys and occupa- 



I AM If 

tions, realizing their purely transitory nature and 
the spiritual danger of limiting ourselves to them. 
They shift and change and pass, as the rolling 
clouds of the summer sky build themselves into 
fantastic imitations of mountain ranges, battle- 
mented walls and towering castles, and then melt 
into the infinite blue of the placid sky leaving but 
a memory behind. But there are other qualities of 
life which are stable and undying and only deepen 
with the flight of the eternal years. There is no 
world conceivable where the qualities of purity, of 
righteousness, of love can be meaningless and want 
their exercise; there is no lapse of time that can 
render them outgrown. And that because they 
are deep-rooted in the nature of the spirit, are per- 
manent modes of the spirit's self-expression, are 
ultimately the expression of the life of God through 
the life of the spirit. 

It is our Lord's eternity, his essential divinity, 
which assures us of the permanency of the relations 
that we establish with him. Because he is, we are, 
and shall be. "Because I live, ye shall live also.'* 
No teaching, no example, can establish permanent 
relations with God, we attain stability in him. 
Apart from his divine authority how can we so 
much as know that we survive death? or how can 
we know that we pass out of death, admitting that 
we survive it, into a stable state? How can we 
(3) 



1 8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

know that at death we are not beginning one stage 
more in an endless round of unstable existences? 
People outside of Christianity, and without any 
definite religion, make constantly the assumption of 
an endless and happy immortality as before them; 
that, however difficult and pain-stricken this 
world may be, they will speedily reach another 
world which is immeasurably better. This assump- 
tion would seem to rest on very slight foundation. 
Even admitting that the practically universal hu- 
man belief in immortality is a thing we may trust 
to, it tells us nothing of the nature of that immor- 
tality. The assumption that it must be what we 
would like it to be is puerile. Laying aside the 
knowledge of the future that comes to us through 
the revelation which is the outcome of the life of 
Christ, — what ground is there for assuming that 
the future for the human being is anything more 
than a new "setting out upon his travels," under 
changed conditions, to be sure, but why infallibly 
changed for the better? Or why not a re-entrance 
into this world to take up once more the weary 
burden of life ? Out of Christ, I see no certainty of 
rest or peace; and there is nothing that could be 
more disheartening than to think of oneself as im- 
mortal with an immortality that is ever restless, 
that reaches stability nowhere. It would seem to 
be just because of the horror of that thought that 



I AM 19 

the Buddhist thinks with joy of a final state in 
which all consciousness of individual existence 
shall be lost forever. It is the splendor of the 
Christian revelation that it has relieved us of that 
"horror of great darkness," the horror of being 
thrown out as homeless wanderers into the un- 
known. l 'I am" ; that is the word of peace and se- 
curity. ''Because thou art, O, Jesus, I am, and 
shall be." I do not go out into a dark and silent 
unknown, but to a land of Promise. "Where I am, 
there shall my servant be." I can rest on that. 

It is belief in the divinity of our Lord that en- 
ables us to bear the imperfection of our present con- 
dition. We, "endure as seeing him that is invisi- 
ble." The imperfections and maladjustments that 
are so evident in the present order would be intol- 
erable if it were not that our confidence in our 
Lord brought us the certainty that they are phen- 
omena in an order that is being guided and over- 
ruled by supreme wisdom working to ends we are 
presently unable to comprehend. If we had but 
one brief period of the world's existence from 
which to study the evolution of life on this globe 
we could make nothing of it. It was not until geo- 
logy unrolled the life-story of the earth that we 
could begin to understand the meaning — the origin 
— of present forms of life. Now, if there is still 
much that we do not understand, we are able to 



*0 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

grasp the march of the evolutionary process of the 
world and life as a stupendous whole, marvelous 
in its complexity, yet moving on from stage to stage 
as though to an end foreseen. It is in the light that 
our Lord's entrance into human life has thrown up- 
on the meaning of human existence in relation to 
God, that we are enabled to catch a glimpse of a 
spiritual evolution going on, of which we and the 
world in which we live form one small section. We 
are revealed as being a part of some inconceivably 
great spiritual process, and we are warned by the 
history of human speculation upon the life-history 
of the earth not to assume that we can read the 
meaning of God's whole purpose from the phen- 
omena of the fraction of it with which we are in 
some degree familiar. Fragments of the purpose 
are revealed to us, our own duty in the present is 
made sufficiently known to guide our action, but of 
the place in the entire purpose of God that such 
phenomena as pain and sin and love occupy, we are 
"no fit judges." The only inference we dare 
make is, that knowing God as revealed in Christ, 
we may be confident that all things are working ac- 
cording to his good will to an ultimate realization 
of good. It is perhaps safe for us to think of our- 
selves as in a relatively early stage in the spiritual 
evolution of man. When we have in mind the un- 
numbered years of man's physical evolution, that 



I AM 21 

time during which he has been in the possession of 
spiritual ideals and seeking to assimilate them 
seems brief. And shall it take less time to work 
out a world-order dominated by the Spirit, than it 
took to elevate the animal to the perception of the 
spiritual? There is no need that we should be dis- 
couraged or disheartened or driven to pessimism 
and unbelief by the pressure of the sin and imperfec- 
tion that we see. For amid it all we do see clearly one 
phenomenon which outweighs all the rest — we see 
God in Christ working for the redemption of the 
world. We are bewildered by the shifting and 
contradictory phenomena of life, but we are sure of 
the character of God. When we see some great 
statesman dealing with problems of government of 
which we are unable to see the solution we confide 
in the wisdom or goodness of the man whom we 
know as the justification of the means he is using, 
though we are unable to see how they can work his 
end. In the last analysis we are obliged to trust 
to the character of our fellows as the justification 
of their acts. And we are obliged to trust, and are 
right in our trust, in the character of God as a jus- 
tification of the world as it is. That we see Jesus 
is for us enough. Far from us be that pessimistic 
criticism of the world-order which refuses faith in; 
God and loyal service to him because we are una- 
ble to see the justice or the goodness of much that; 



*2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

takes place here. There is, indeed, much in the 
world that it is hard for a thoughtful man to bear; 
much that weighs upon his heart and drains his 
sympathies. We often feel as a reproach our own 
success or happiness and peace. We often ask 
ourselves how, if we really care for others, we can 
endure to be happy. But beyond that is our cer- 
tainty that God is righteous and that all things in 
some inconceivable way work together for good. 
"I am," our Lord says; and in the faith of his di- 
vinity we rest secure. "God is love," St. John tells 
us, and we need not to have been told, for we have 
seen him revealed in the human life of our Lord. 
"Clouds and darkness" may be for the present 
round about him in the working of his will and 
purpose; but in some far-off eventide there will be 
light. 

In the meantime the mission is upon us to asso- 
ciate ourselves with our Lord in the work of spirit- 
ualizing the world. Through us, because we have 
been made one with him, and given the power that 
resides in sonship, there is a release of spiritual 
power. We are vital centers of the energies of the 
kingdom of God through which its power goes out 
to the world. That power manifests itself in us in 
many ways according to our individual vocations 
and capacities. It manifests itself first of all in us 
by the transfiguration of our desires. The life of 



I AM 23 

God's children is most evident as a life of changing 
desires. As we follow that life step by step in its 
development, we see the cruel and animal selfish- 
ness of youth giving way to the matured unselfish- 
ness of spiritual principle. There is nothing more 
pathetic than youth under the domination of restless, 
uncontrolled passion, heedless of any appeal of spir- 
itual things. The language of the Spirit is for the 
present an unknown tongue. One recalls young 
men and women in whom the drive of the passions 
seems so uncontrollable, that we can only under- 
stand them through the hypothesis of a possessed 
personality — a personality dominated by demoniac 
power. Yet one sees, too, that personality checked, 
controlled, mastered, by the quiet, insistent, un- 
yielding pressure of spiritual principle. One sees 
the character transformed and moulded into the 
matured strength of the servant of God. And we 
feel that the spiritual power brought to bear on 
that soul is in large measure brought to bear 
through other human personalities ; that the power 
of God is mediated through us. There is the quiet 
power of pure example, of life lived simply and un- 
obtrusively in obedience to the guidance of the 
Holy Spirit, whose unspoken meaning can be un- 
derstood and whose influence can be felt. There is 
the power of unspoken love that never ceases to 
press upon its object with the silent influence of its 



24 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

self-giving. Above all, there is the power of 
ceaseless intercession which nets the soul as with 
filaments of gold and draws it to the feet of God. 
In this strange world we are none of us independent 
or separate, but are members of that hidden unity 
which is the Body of Christ, and subject all the 
time to the action of the unseen forces of that Body. 
The threads of the church's intercessions twine and 
intertwine about the soul; voices angelic, saintly, 
and of sinners even, mix and mingle in the ever- 
rising incense-cloud that comes before the rainbow- 
circled Throne. Prayers go up from altars and 
from closets, aye, from streets and city squares, 
which set in motion forces of the spiritual order 
that penetrate to the soul in the midst of folly and 
sin. They come, these messengers of God, to the 
souls of men, calling up memories of the past, 
evoking the faces of those long dead, awakening 
the conscience from its torpor, bringing back mem- 
ories of its childhood's purity, pressing the contrast 
between the present man or woman and what they* 
once might have been and hoped to be. There are 
unnumbered points of contact where the powers of 
the spiritual world touch us awakening in us re- 
sponse to the monitions they convey. 

The response to our Lord's revelation of himself 
as eternal as the "I am," has, we remember, a back- 
ward look to the revelation of God which i9 in the 



I AM 25 

Old Testament. It is there that God is represent- 
ed as making himself known to Moses and sending 
him to the children of Israel with the message, "I 
Am hath sent me unto you." It is the name of God 
connected in a special way with the future and the 
fulfillment of the divine promises: it is the name 
that assures us of the constant presence of God 
making good his promises to us. It is the name 
that calls out faith — our Lord contrasts the blind- 
ness of the Jews that saw him, God manifest in the 
flesh, with the faith of Abraham who saw his day 
and was glad. Abraham's was the vision of one 
who sees the fulfillment of God's promises in the 
fact that they are God's. What God promises is 
at once a certainty, and faith embraces it as such. 
And we, however much we have received, still live 
by faith in the promises of God. The response 
that we make to God's promises is to act upon them 
as certain things to which we may fearlessly submit 
ourselves. This is at the basis of our adoption of 
spiritual ideals of life, filling our lives with activi- 
ties that are useless and meaningless if life is con- 
terminous with this world, which become meaning- 
ful only if this life is preparatory to a life in the 
future in the presence of God. Whatever fruits 
humanity may have here and now they are but 
"first fruits" of a harvest rich beyond all imagining 
that we shall reap hereafter. But that harvest is 



26 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

revealed to the eye of faith that has embraced the 
promises of God. The full significance of the 
Christian virtues is as yet only visible to faith; of 
this we may say that it "does not yet appear what 
they shall be." That is why the Christian life re- 
mains a mystery to so many. Why not, they ask, 
pluck the fruit now ready to your hand? But the 
answer is, Why eat the green fruit? We are wait- 
ing for the harvest, for the fruits that ripen upon 
the Tree of Life which stands "in the midst of the 
street'' of the city, and "on either side of the river.'' 
There are virtues which in this world seem mis- 
placed and untimely and perplexing, which we shall 
find in their full significance then. They bud here, 
but the air is uncongenial to them. It is very dif- 
ficult to make much out of meekness in a world like 
this, and the portion of its inheritance hitherto is 
very small. Purity is a perplexing virtue until we 
reach such a development of it that it becomes an 
organ of vision, the medium of our seeing of God. 
It may be said, generally, of the training of the 
Christian, that what the Holy Spirit does in that 
training we do not see now, but we shall see here- 
after ; here in the half-shadows of the brazen mir- 
ror, enigmatically; there in full-flowered signifi- 
cance. It is a wonderful thing, this faith of the 
Christian, no less than a divine gift, which enables 
us to pursue a way of which we know that we shall 



I AM 2 J 

see no end here to sow "harvests'' that we must die 
to reap, to lay the foundation of a building that 
can only be completed in another world. 

But such have been the lives of God's saints from 
the beginning, from faithful Abraham to this day, 
they have walked by faith in the Son of God. Gen- 
eration after generation has gone to its grave 
looking eagerly to the revelation that is 
on the other side of death — eagerly, and not 
at all doubtingly, for they know that "faith- 
ful is he who has promised." And as we 
know that the light that we see streaming athwart 
the darkness of the winter night must have some 
source, so we know that the life of faith which has 
lightened men's steps through the darkness of this 
world has its source in the world of the Spirit, and 
that those who follow it will find their home. 

And though it be true that we walk by faith, not 
by sight, yet there is an element of sight in our 
experience. We see Jesus, the present revelation 
of God. We see his life, which was like our life 
"crowned with glory and honor." We see the ap- 
parent finality of death conquered by him. We 
see him in the power of his resurrection passing 
into the open heavens and taking his Throne at 
the Right Hand of the Father. And we hear the 
words of his promise, "Where I am there shall 
my servant be," "because I live ye shall live also." 



tS THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

And we look out across the snow-bound fields of 
death to where a light breaks from the world of 
the Spirit, and hear the voice of his invitation fall- 
ing on our dying ears, "Come unto me all ye that 
are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you 
rest." 



I AM THE WAY. 

Let us listen to the zvords of our Lord — 
I Am the Way. 

Let us try to picture to ourselves — 

^^*HE journeying of the Children of Israel 
^^ through the wilderness. We imagine them 
joyfully going out from Egypt in eagerness 
to reach the Land of Promise, but if we think a 
moment we know that few of them had so definite 
a thought of the future as is implied in that. The 
thing that was foremost in their minds was the 
fact of their slavery; anything was better than 
that; so they were ready to follow Moses. But 
with what continual hesitations and murmurings 
.as the difficulties of the way displayed themselves. 
We seem to see them on their line of march through 
the waterless wilderness — stretches of rock and 

29 



$0 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

sand glowing under the pitiless light of the mid-day 
sun. What heart-crushing monotony; it oppresses 
one even now to read of it. "And they departed 
from Hashemona and encamped at Moseroth. And 
they departed from Moseroth and pitched in Beue- 
Jaakan". Day after day, year after year, of mere 
wilderness — the murmurings and the rebellions be- 
came quite conceivable. How aimless it must 
have seemed to the average Israelite whether they 
moved or camped ; whether they stayed few days or 
more. With what indifference he listened to the 
trumpet that told him that that day they were to 
set forward to some station which would be but 
a repetition of the rock and sand and scanty herb- 
age that he could see now from his tent door. With 
what hopeless lack of interest he saw the symbol 
of faith — of a faith that he hardly shared — the 
priest-borne Ark setting forward on the desert 
way. To him it only meant the weariness of one 
more day's march, and when the day ended he 
was confident that whatever else the crimson light 
of the sunset revealed to him, it would not be the 
vine-clad hills and the waving corn-fields of a 
Promised Land. Think of the weary horror of a 
life that had ceased to believe and expect. 

Consider j first — 

That notwithstanding the discouragment of the 



I AM THE WAY 3 1 

appearance, these people were approaching the ful- 
fillment of their hopes. Beyond the hills there lay, 
gleaming in the sunlight — that same sunlight that 
now, reflected from wastes of rock and sand, 
blinded them — slopes clad with vine and valleys 
laughing with corn. It was but a little way to go 
physically ; but, alas ! it was so far spiritually. The 
reason they had not passed the border long ago 
lay just in themselves. That is the value of such 
history as this, that it displays the pathetic tragedy 
of humanity blindly shutting itself from the yearn- 
ing of the divine tenderness by its unfaith : by its 
self-willed resistance to the divine guidance clos- 
ing to itself the road to the Promised Land. It 
was only a little way off, the unfolding of the divine 
purpose, the fulfillment of the divine promise; but 
it was whole worlds away from the spiritual ca- 
pacity of these men. So they must die and leave 
their bones in the wilderness, and what had been 
offered to them would be offered in turn to their 
children. God was there awaiting them, speaking 
to them by the mouth of his faithful servants; but 
they, his chosen, are overwhelmed by the material 
difficulties of life, and unable to oppose to them 
a triumphal faith — a faith that can confront the 
present in a confidence born out of past experiences 
of God. How is it that the past, so obviously God- 



$2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

guided, gives men so little of confident hope in the 
face of the present difficulty? 

Consider, second — 

That our necessity is to find God's guidance in 
the midst of our present life. We need to guard 
against the temptation under which Israel fell — 
the danger of making material success and com- 
fort in such wise the end of our thought that we 
shall regard the achievement of them as the mark 
of the divine approval. Nothing more surely 
closes our eyes to distant prospects and deadens 
our souls to the need of future seeking than the 
self -contentment of a comfortable life. Content- 
ment in religion is the mark of lukewarmness. 
We reach no Promised Lands of spiritual conquest 
except across the weariness of deserts where we 
ccem often to have lost the way, often on the 
point of being conquered by our enemies, often at 
the end of our powers of endurance. We cry out 
for plainness, for certainty; we rebel against the 
fact that we have to live by faith ; we insist on all 
intellectual difficulties in religion being removed. 
We want visible and tangible guidance : "Up, make 
us gods to go before us ; for as for this Moses, we 
wot not what has become of him". We want to 
be fed with the solid food of earth — our soul 



I AM THE WAY 33 

loatheth this light bread of faith and grace ard the 
invisible presence of the Divine; these are too in- 
tangible to support and guide. But they are the 
only guides there are. The alternative is, rely on 
them and fare forward, or die here in the wilder- 
ness. We must find God here in the midst of the 
commonness of the daily duty, as a part of the daily 
routine; we must see him hidden in the ordinary 
happenings of life. God is One and Omnipresent, 
and if we cannot find him here, we cannot find him 
anywhere. The way of his love and of his guid- 
ance stretches before us morning by morning — a 
daily way. We rise to go on our journey from 
some Hashemona that we have found sand and 
barrenness, to some Moseroth that will most likely 
prove as tiresome. We impatiently murmur, Is 
this the joy and reward of serving God? No: 
because we have missed the companionship that 
should lighten the way. We have forgotten that 
the significance of the way is that it has been worn 
by the feet that have preceded us, that it is in- 
dicated even now by the Pillar of Cloud by day 
and the Pillar of Fire by night — the symbols of the 
Presence of God. We fail to see that its dreariness 
is the result of our letting go of the hand of God 
and attempting to walk in our own wisdom and 
strength. 
(4) 



34 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Let us then pray — 

To remember that God's guiding presence is 
with us here and now. That we may lift our eyes 
from the dreariness of the desert to the Divine 
Light that is always before us. 

Jesus, our Master, do thou meet us while we 
walk in the way, and long to reach the Country; 
so that following thy light, we may keep the way 
of righteousness, and never wander away into the 
horrible darkness of this world's night, while Thou, 
who art the Way, the Truth, and the Life, art shin- 
ing within us. Through the same Jesus Christ, our 
Lord. 



As one looks back over one's life in the light 
of one's Christian experience, one feels that noth- 
ing more awful could befall one than not to know 
God. What barrenness and waste, how like a 
desert way that has no known end, a way marked 
by the bleaching bones of animals and men who 
have perished in their attempt to pass there, would 
life be. Imagine all your religious experience 
blotted out; those moments of prayer when you 
were caught up into the third heaven and saw 
visions of God; those hours of meditation when 
the inner meaning of some spiritual truth grew 
upon you till you thrilled with the joy of discovery 



I AM THE WAY 3£ 

and found your life lit by new light, and your 
path which had seemed dark and tangled, grew 
plain as the revelation of the mind of God shone 
on it ; those times of sacramental communion when 
you felt the love of God encircle you and the 
Presence within your very soul. What would 
it mean to lose all that and many, many other 
experiences that have been yours, and look out 
upon a world that is at most a creation of an un- 
known God! To find that behind the whole uni- 
verse there is perhaps the presence of some Un- 
known Power, and to have to decipher the meaning 
of it from the perplexing facts of the material 
world itself? To feel in the spring sunshine the 
stirring of a life which is evidenced by the songs 
of the birds, and the waving of tall grasses, and all 
the rich bloom wherewith the earth covers itself, 
and have no power to translate the meaning of 
this joyous existence ! To feel the pleasure of it 
die away and be replaced by vague forebodings 
of ill as the clouds gather and the storm comes 
and the birds' notes die away and brightness passes 
from the face of the earth ! To be in continual un- 
certainty as to the meaning of life — life which 
seems to come out of darkness and vanish as mys- 
teriously as it came ! 

That is what the world was for many centuries; 
and the reason that it is not that to us to-da) is 



36 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

because God has made a Revelation of Himself. 
But still it is only some few that the revelation has 
effectively reached. The world remains in its old 
darkness for multitudes even now; and not those 
whom we describe as "in heathen darkness lying," 
and struggle to evangelize and bring to the knowl- 
edge of the Revelation God has made, but multi- 
tudes in our own land whom no Gospel has enlight- 
ened. This country is filled with people of no 
religion for whom God in Christ has revealed him- 
self in vain. You know some of them perhaps ; they 
are even members of your own household, they are 
your intimate friends; and they grope their way 
through the world without guidance; they try to 
think that all will end for the best; and they 
strive to sustain the mystery of it as they 
may. Or there are people with only a half- 
assimilated religion, whose minds are chaos 
in respect to all spiritual things — they also 
get nothing of guidance in their perplexity, or 
help in their weakness and need. How pathetic 
they are, these gropers! When they have to make 
the critical decisions of life, and no man can es- 
cape a necessity to make them, they blindly catch 
at any straw that would seem to help them, not 
knowing where to turn for help in their inexperi- 
ence of God. In the crisis of suffering and loss 
their distressful faces sadden us ; but they are even 



I AM THE WAY 37 

sadder in their moments of elation and success, 
when they glow with a sense of triumph which we 
know can be but passing. This world in which 
the Revelation of God offers itself and cannot get 
listened to is even more pitiable than the world 
that is still waiting and striving and hoping for 
some knowledge of God. Nay, one feels that that 
living world of heathenism, with all its limitations 
and all its falsities, is a more hopeful world, a 
world nearer God, than the world of dead souls 
that surrounds the oases of Christianity in America. 
The wood and stone that the heathen bow down to, 
symbolize something spiritually more energetic, 
something that enters life with a power more in- 
vigorating, than the ideals which fill minds of 
many a western man or woman, who is still quite 
sure of his superior enlightenment, quite certain 
that whatever the future, which he doesn't much 
trouble to think of, holds for him, will be of the 
best; that when the mists that now hang before it 
unclose they will reveal the City of God. One lets 
one's imagination wander a little freely, and thinks 
of a fleet of ships sailing out from some port upon 
the ocean's edge. Many voyagers have already 
crossed that sea; they have told the tale of its 
danger and left the story of its safest paths. But 
our fleet heeds none of these, neither will it take 
compass — the invention of medieval man, nor re- 



3** THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

gard the stars — the superstition of half barbarous 
ancestors. But they sail gayly out into the distance 
which they choose to think unknown; they vanish 
in the mists of silver, pink and pearl which hang 
as a curtain over the waters. Who shall prophesy 
their fate ? Is it indeed the surest way to find the 
City of God, to treat with contempt and scorn 
those who have been before us in the way? Per- 
sonally, I get more help on the journey Godwards 
from those who have worshipped a God, call him 
as they may, than from those who can only tell us 
of their failure to find any God at all. 

I am ever conscious of living in a world from 
which God is hidden, where men lead their lives 
without the consciousness of anything more Divine 
than themselves. As I watch them in the use of 
their lives they seem to me to be using life quite 
as a chance thing. There is visible in them no 
sense of responsibility. The thing that they can do 
is the thing that they may do. I seem to see that this 
lack of any feeling of responsibility to any power 
outside themselves is generating an intense selfish- 
ness. The reactions of life upon themselves — that 
they may be as pleasant as possible — are what men 
are concerned with ! The effect of example or ac- 
tion on others is negligible. The lust for mere 
amusement is as a tide ever rising; and like any 
appetite, as it grows jaded must be whipped with 



I AM THE WAY 39 

stimulants of ever greater intensity. There is a 
luxury of amusement at which decadent Rome 
would have stared in wonder and envy. There is 
a shamelessness of dress , of conversation, of action, 
at which one stands aghast. And the answer to 
those who protest is that we have broken away 
from the narrow views of the past; and the pro- 
tester is pelted with epithets — Puritan, suburban, 
parochial. How long will it be before Christian 
is added? Men were first called Christian with an 
inflection of contempt as the followers of One 
who died a death of shame. Is the day coming 
when the inflection which began in Antioch, will 
come back in New York? We need not be pessi- 
mists to think so! it is no new fact in the history 
of our religion that a society should revolt and 
abandon it. It is only in the world, not in any 
locality, that the Church cannot fail. 

This spreading feeling of uncertainty and ir- 
responsibility, and heedlessness of restraint, eats 
deeper into that part of the community which 
still calls itself Christian, and still preserves some 
semblance of allegiance to the religion of the Cruci- 
fied. We have got back to the state of the early 
Church where the difficulty of being a Christian 
was intensified by the fact that the profession of 
Christianity made an open breach with the society 
in which the believer lived. It has become once 



40 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

more exceedingly difficult to train a child in the 
practice of religion, because the practice of religion 
more and more means isolation — the separation of 
the life, the amusements, — from the social life 
of his fellows. We have been dwelling so much 
on the difficulty of belief as being intellectual dif- 
ficulty that we have neglected the fact that the 
greatest difficulties of religion are social. It is not 
so difficult to believe in a God, as in a God whose 
service can be combined with the social life of 
our time. Our intolerance of restraint makes a 
religion that restrains abhorred. When the lure of 
the city appeals so intensely to every sense — offers 
every sense its full gratification — how difficult is the 
mission of a religion which teaches the control and 
repression of the senses. When the material is 
omnipresent and insistent, how can the voice of the 
spiritual needs of man hope to make itself heard 
and heeded? How can a religion which has as 
its basis a demand for asceticism expect success 
with a community which has forgotten the very 
meaning of asceticism except as a word of con- 
tempt ? 

All this sounds very pessimistic, I know; but 
it is not really so. It is never hopeless to face the 
facts as they are; indeed, the only hopeful proced- 
ure is first of all to be clear where we stand — to 
be clear as to the nature of the problem before us. 



I AM THE WAY 4 1 

I do not conceal that to me the problem seems of 
the gravest; but it is not therefore hopeless. The 
Christian religion has more than once shown 
itself capable of regenerating the ideals and re- 
animating the moral force of society which seemed 
doomed. It can do so once again. But in order to 
do so it must first of all shake itself loose from the 
cords wherewith modern religious theory has 
bound it fast. We need to get rid of the altogether 
human and philanthropic Christ of modern re- 
ligionism, in whom no Divinity is perceptible; who 
must perform no miracle, lest he offend science; 
who must not be born of a virgin, lest he offend 
"the uniformity of nature;" and must not rise 
again on the third day from the dead, because a 
bodily resurrection makes too many difficulties for 
philosophers. We need that thoroughly super- 
natural Christ who "coming down from heaven" 
imparts to the nature that he unites to himself 
the regenerating force of present God. If we are 
simply a part of nature, caught in the net of its 
unswerving laws, how can we hope to disentangle 
ourselves ! It is only as a new power comes to our 
help that we can look for rescue, that we can hope- 
fully expect to see an open road to God. 

To open such a road is the mission of Christ, He 
brought not "good advice" as to our bearing to 
our fellowmen, but "Good News" of restored ac- 



42 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

cess to the Father. In the Incarnation the mean- 
ing of God — that meaning which men had striven 
from the beginning to understand, and sometimes 
had indeed grasped the fringe of, but more often 
had grotesquely misunderstood — is unfolded. The 
Good News of the Incarnation is that Jesus is God ; 
that God is not an abstract conception for the 
human intellect to amuse or perplex itself with, 
but that the meaning of God is to be found in 
the life of Jesus. Here is God's self-presentation. 
He who sees Jesus sees the Father; he who knows 
Jesus knows the Father. There is no other way 
to this seeing and knowing than through Jesus. 

"I am the way," Jesus says. He does not say, 
I make known the way; but I am the way. The 
difference is very great. It is that we are not 
called or directed to follow a prescribed path; we 
are not told to walk by ourselves under however 
efficient direction; but we are invited to approach 
the Father in Christ, by a life of union with him. 
Our Lord does not reveal himself as the goal of a 
journey which is beset with dangers and difficulties, 
and on which we may quite conceivably go astray. 
He reveals himself as the beginning of that jour- 
ney, that beginning and abiding in him we need 
never go astray. The Christian life does not end 
in union, as the crown of its achievement; it be- 
gins with union as the conditon of its success. 



I AM THE WAY 43 

'Thou art the Way, 
» Hadst thou been but the Goal, 
I cannot say 

Thou'dst ever found my soul/ 

Herein is that tremendous difference that separ- 
ates Christianity from all other religions. It is, too, 
the touchstone of Catholic Christianity which sep- 
arates it from other forms of religion which assume 
the name of Christianity, and do, indeed, contain 
Christian elements. Contrast it for a moment with 
that conception of Christianity which is called 
liberal. This conceives the essence of religion to 
be that Christ revealed God as our Father, and all 
men as brethren. This surely is much; contrasted 
with the message of other religions it can hardly be 
over-appreciated. But considered in itself it has- 
obvious limitations. The most obvious is that it 
leaves us with an ideal that is so stupendous that 
it depresses. The ideal of life that is involved, — 
who can attain to! In the end liberalism is com- 
pelled to hold that, while its ideal is beautiful it 
does not matter very much to one's soul's health 
whether one attain it or no. If one attain it one 
becomes a better and more helpful man; but one 
never becomes more. This is so because an ideal 
has no compulsive force; it attracts, it does not 
energize. To liberalism Christianity is external 



44 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

teaching, directing one, not eternal life possessing 
one. 

Christianity does not end in God, it begins in 
God. It is not the aspiration and fruition of natural 
powers, but the gift of himself that God in Christ 
makes to us. The old summing up of Christianity 
is the truest ; God became man that man might be- 
come Divine. The way of approach to God is 
through God himself. We must first be in God 
and God in us, and then we can and must grow 
up in God till we attain to the full-grown 
spiritual man. The Christian life is the bringing 
into explicitness of the life of God which is implicit 
within our souls through our union with the In- 
carnate. Christian experience is not conformity to 
some set of rules of living, but is the externalization 
of the Christ-experience with which we have been 
united. Just as the clay under the manipulation of 
the sculptor grows to express his thought — a thought 
that was there from the beginning and which you 
may watch in the very process of its growth as you 
look on at the work; so the life of the Christian 
tends to express the divine thought for it, and you 
see the birth-process as you watch the process of 
the unfolding life. The figure is imperfect. It is 
really as though the clay itself had the thought of 
a perfect statue and were moulding itself under the 
impulse of the thought. Something like this we do 



I AM THE WAY 45 

find in the world of life where the fertilized cell 
which is the beginning of each living thing con- 
tains the promise and potency of the full grown 
creature. We can see the process of the creature's 
growth under the impulse of the indwelling life; 
but we cannot fathom the mystery of heredity 
by which each life brings forth "after his kind." 
Neither can we fathom the mystical union by which 
the heredity of our "sinful nature" is modified 
and at length abolished, and the "new creation" 
in Christ Jesus is brought to birth and maturity. 

The way to the Father, then, is revealed to be 
through ever more completely realized union with 
Christ Jesus. This is the way to the Father be- 
cause Christ is being formed in us, our lives are 
conformed to him; that is, the external life grows 
into more exact correspondence with its internal 
reality. This process of expressing Christ is the 
Christian life — each new and growing virtue of 
that life being an added experience of the Christ- 
life in which we are "hidden'', one more mark of 
our "conformity" to him in all things, one more 
step in the Way which he is. As we watch the 
life of nature, which ultimately is the life of God, 
embodying itself at the coming of Spring in leaf 
and bud and flower, performing before cur very 
eyes the miracle of creation; so we may follow in 
the unfolding of the life of the Christian the process 



46 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of spiritual creation — the first tentative, hesitant 
appearance of a spiritual quality, its struggle for 
stability, its acquisition of strength, its power of 
resistance, its unfolding in the maturity of its 
growth. Each such conformity of the life to its 
Way, which is Christ, is a new revelation of in- 
dwelling Divine power, and in turn is a new organ 
of receptivity through which a fuller revelation of 
the meaning of God makes its way to it. 

It is by such steps in the Way that the Christian 
comes to his goal — comes to know the Father as 
revealed in Christ. This knowledge can only come 
through likeness. We know the Father through 
the Son who alone has seen him. By union with 
the Son we have acquired capacity to know. As 
he himself says: "no man knoweth .... who 
the Father is save the Son and he to whom the 
Son will reveal him." And this knowledge is not 
an external communication of knowledge, as one 
can tell another fact about God; it is much more 
intimate than that, and is by participation of nature. 

We, then, are in the Way — in Christ; and pro- 
gress in the spiritual life means a growing con- 
trol of the life of Christ over our life ; not simply 
a growing pressure of his example, conceived as 
the typical life, but an inner mastery of our life 
by his Spirit which dwelleth in us. So the Way 
to the Father, which is Jesus, becomes more famil- 



I AM THE WAY 47 

iar to us, and we begin to understand his own say- 
ing, "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father'' 
— come to understand that Jesus is not the mes- 
senger of a distant God, but a revelation of the 
one God whom for the present we can only know 
as he reveals himself under the limitations of our 
nature. 

It results from this fact of our being in "the 
Way" that all that restlessness and selfishness of 
which I spoke in the beginning of this meditation, 
appears to us in its true character as the struggle 
of a nature as yet not perfectly subdued to the 
obedience of Christ, inasmuch as the will of the 
flesh is not perfectly merged in the will of the 
Spirit. Perfect life is perfect correspondence; 
and we have not reached perfection while there 
remains a strong tension of the will of the flesh. 
Our approximation to perfection may be measured 
by stress of this will and the frequent disturbance 
of the life. Just as in the evolution of morals 
there are acts which were once innocent which have 
become sin as the moral level of human life has 
been raised, so there are directions and applica- 
tions of our life's energy which were possible for 
us at one stage of our spiritual development, but 
which are become impossible simply because the 
level of our life has been raised. As you travel 
from the lowlands up the mountain-side the path 



48 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

which you follow winds ever amid a changing 
flora; you pass out of the rank growths of marsh 
plants and grasses to the sturdier growths of the 
windswept highlands. The elms and willows give 
way to the chestnuts and oaks and pines. At each 
level the life, if less exuberant, is stronger, able to 
abide a severer stress of the storm wind, able to 
endure a bleaker sky. It is so in the growth of the 
spirit. In our religious immaturity what Fruits of 
the Spirit we show are unstable and need protec- 
tion, and we still tend to revert to an inferior type 
of production, as the gorgeous hybrid tends to 
revert to its ancestoral wild-flower. And the fruits 
of the flesh continue, at least sporadically, beside 
the Fruits of the Spirit. As we advance to the 
heights we are disciplined by the winds of adversity, 
and the storms of affliction, and, if we can stand 
the process of transplanting to the new climate, 
we put forth a new strength which reveals itself 
in qualities of patience, of endurance, of serenity. 
There is a figure familiar to the Old Testament 
drawn from the open threshing-floor of the ancients. 
We see the hard-beaten clay floor on the windy 
hill-top, and the husbandman tossing the mingled 
wheat and chaff in the air; and we see the chaff 
blown away before the wind, while the heavy grain 
falls back to the ground. So our characters are 
winnowed by the wind of the Spirit, and the chaff 



I AM THE WAY 49 

swept away that the good wheat may remain un- 
mixed. Those who are in the Way travel upward, 
and must be exposed, as he was, to the trials of the 
Ascent. They must pass the rock-strewn desert 
where every stone suggests that they might stop 
there and sate the senses with the bread of this 
world which their nature hungers after, abandoning 
their high mission, and leaving the Way-farer to 
go on alone. Bread is good and innocent, and they 
are weary of the "light bread'' of spiritual susten- 
ance. They must find themselves mysteriously 
raised on the pinnacle of the Temple, looking down 
to the thronged courts below, and hear the whisper 
of the crowds which suggests a baseless trust in 
God — Abandon the Way here and cast thyself 
down; rest in the present attainment, it is enough 
to impress men with your sanctity ; the way beyond 
is still steep and toilsome. They must stand upon 
the mountain-top at last, and there find, surprisedly, 
that what is revealed to them is not the Kingdom 
of Heaven come with power, but a vision of the 
Kingdoms of the world and all the glory of them, 
sunlit, entrancing, enticing, and feel the certainty 
that all these may be theirs if only they will abandon 
the Way. It is an appalling alternative which con- 
fronts the soul — to stretch out the hand and have 
all these which it thought it had abandoned and 
which had never seemed so beautiful as in this 
(5) 



5© THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

moment when they are ready to vanish forever; or 
close the eyes to them, certain that when once 
more they are opened we shall stand upon a moun- 
tain indeed, but with no vision of kingdoms at our 
feet, but instead, find close beside us, the Cross in 
all its gaunt nakedness. This is the thing that we 
have chosen. Hitherto has the Way lead us; and 
we with him must hang thereon. 

"I am the Way." he says; ''no man cometh to 
the Father but by me." There is no other way. 
But as we think of our progress Godward we in- 
ject into our thought much of hardness and diffi- 
culty which is not there; we let our imagination 
gather clouds over the future that we shall not 
have to pass through. For again, remember we 
are not seeking the Father in response to the com- 
mand of Christ, but we are seeking him in Christ. 
The power by which Christ endured the human 
experience was the power of his union with the 
Father — "I and my Father are one". And the 
power by which we live the life of the Spirit is 
the like power of union with God in Christ. Am I 
insisting too much when I say again that this is 
not what we end with but what we begin with? 
Every step of our journey Godward is in this Way. 
It makes a tremendous difference whether the 
child is sent out upon a journey to the other side 
of the forest with careful instructions as to the 



1 AM THE WAY 5 1 

way and the dangers he may meet/ or whether his 
father just takes his hand and says, "Come''. But 
our Blessed Lord took our hands in our earliest 
infancy, before we knew or heard of him, and said, 
"Come" — and he has never left us. He never 
leaves us even when we, consciously, try to leave 
him. 

"I fled Him down the nights and down the days ; 

I fled Him down the arches of the years; 
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways 
Of my own mind ; and in the midst of tears 
I hid from Him." 

That thought of the present, yet baffled God. is 
one of the deepest of our faith. We gaze on some 
broken, sinful life, willingly giving itself over to 
the power of Satan, as it seems, and the hope fades 
out of our soul. The words that we try to say die 
on our lips ; the hand that we were about to stretch 
out we draw back again. Here is spiritual 
disaster, full and complete, we tell ourselves. Here 
is the total wreck of one of God's experiments. 
No word or act of ours can be of any avail here. 
It may be so — no word or act of ours. But are 
there no words, no acts of God, still in reserve? 
Within that life, we may be confident, there is 
still a struggle. There Michael the Archangel 
fights against the dragon. Yes! and a greater 



52 THE SELF-REVF.LATION OF OUR LORD 

than Michael. There the Way fights and the soul, 
broken and defiled, is still in the Way. He has not 
given over the battle ; and when we have laid down 
our arms in despair, he still fights on. Perhaps he 
will win even yet, as he won the Thief on the Cross. 
Perhaps the tired eyes of the Father, looking once 
more down the lane that leads to a Farmhouse 
door, will light up as he recognizes under the rags 
and dust the form of his son — the son who, after 
all is coming back, drawn by the unseen force of 
the Father's love. We cannot know in what depths 
or corners of a man's spiritual nature God can 
hide himself and wait; but we know that he is 
there, somewhere, waiting and eager. We are 
told that in the Middle Ages when the beggar came 
to the monastery gate — tramp, outcast, leper, what- 
ever he might be, the brother who opened the door 
met him and embraced him and kissed him upon 
the forehead and led him in to refreshment and 
rest. It is thus that the Way deals with us, abid- 
ing with us in all our wanderings, seeming to meet 
and welcome us when we return from afar — seem- 
ing, for it is a divine deceitfulness ; he has been 
with us all the time. 

O distant Christ! the crowded, darkening years 
Drift slow between thy gracious face and me; 
My hungry heart leans back to look for thee, 

But finds the way set thick with doubts and fears. 



I AM THE WAY' S3 

My groping hands would touch thy garment's hem, 
Would find some token thou art walking near; 
Instead they grasp but empty darkness drear, 

And no diviner hands reach out to them. 

Sometimes my listening soul, with bated breath, 
Stands still to catch a foot-fall by my side, 
Lest, haply, my earth-blinded eyes but hide 

Thy stately figure leading life and death; 

My straining eyes, O Christ, but long to mark 
A shadow of thy presence, dim and sweet, 
Or far-off light to guide my wandering feet, 

Or hope for hands prayer-beating 'gainst the dark. 

O thou! unseen by me, that like a child 

Tries in the night to find its mother's heart, 
And weeping wanders only more apart, 

Not knowing in the darkness that she smiled — 

Thou, all unseen, dost hear my tired cry, 
As I, in darkness of a half-belief, 
Grope for thy heart in love and doubt and grief: 

O Lord! speak soon to me — "Lo, here am I." 



I AM THE TRUTH. 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 
I Am the Truth. 

And let us try to picture to ourselves — 

^^*HAT scene at the foot of the mount of Trans- 
^^r figuration, when the father of the possessed 
child whom the disciples could not heal 
comes running to our Lord for help. See the child 
lying on the ground, wallowing. Imagine the feel- 
ings of this father as he states the case to our Lord. 
This is his last hope for his child. This horrible 
affliction had been upon the child from his infancy. 
He has had to be watched all the time, to be rescued 
from the water or the fire into which he was cast 
by some irresistible power. Imagine the anxiety 
with which the father returns home after an ab- 
sence — what has happened to the child since he 

55 



56 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

has been away ? He had sought all means of cure, 
even means that were vainly stupid or useless, in 
his anxiety to leave nothing undone. This last 
report he had heard of one who performed mar- 
velous cures looks more hopeful, and he seeks 
Jesus. But he only finds the disciples gathered 
at the foot of the mountain. They try to heal the 
child — and fail. They fail because Jesus is not with 
them. We always fail when he is away. And the 
man's hope almost fails, too, at this lack of success. 
And then Jesus comes and listens to the man's story 
— listens as he always does, with sympathy and 
kindness. How rarely our Lord ever complains of 
the stupidity or the irresponsiveness of men; but 
he does now. "O faithless generation." And then 
the plea of the father, "If thou canst do anything" ; 
and the quick retort of our Lord, "If thou canst 
believe." See the last contortions of the child, and, 
then, at the word of Jesus, his struggles cease and 
his limbs grow rigid, and the people murmur, "He 
is dead." But Jesus takes him by the hand and 
he arises. 

Consider, first — 

That there was something about our Lord that 
inspired men's confidence. They felt that to com- 
mit themselves to him, to surrender their lives into 
his hands, was the right and natural thing to do. 



I AM THE TRUTH 57 

When he called men, they followed him. Even 
men who it turned out in the sequel had not the 
capacity for discipleship, were so attracted by him 
that they miscalculated their motives and their 
strength of purpose and offered themselves to him. 
Men were convinced that here was one who could 
satisfy all their needs, and they hastened to bring 
them to him. This power of inspiring confidence 
and unlimited trust, is truth. Jesus was one evi- 
dently sincere and trustworthy; he could be taken 
at his word. But more than that; his trustworthi- 
ness was not that of one who was honest in word 
and deed ; it was that of one whose knowledge and 
insight were unerring. Men trusted him because 
they felt that they were safe in his hands, that there 
would be no mistake or bungling in dealing with 
their case. The friend that you rely upon, the 
priest to whom you resort for spiritual counsel and 
advice, may be thoroughly honest and sympathetic 
and eager to help, but there are times when their 
knowledge or their wisdom fails you. Jesus never 
failed. Whatever dark burden of sin men brought 
to him was relieved; whatever idiot child or para- 
lytic friend was laid at his feet was healed. What- 
ever tangled skein of life was placed in his hands 
was unravelled. There was never any failure of 
counsel or helpfulness or sympathy. His person 
had limitless means to meet every occasion. The 



58 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

only failure was the failure of man to believe in 
him, to trust him, to obey him. The only thing 
he required of men was a limitless trust. "If thou 
canst believe, all things are possible to him that 
believeth.' > 

Consider, second — 

There are no other terms of approach to Jesus 
to-day than there were when the father brought his 
child to him with his pathetic pleading. We, too, 
must come to Jesus in the same unlimited confi- 
dence in his truth and willingness to help. Life, 
though it is now illumined by the revelation of 
Jesus, is apt to become to us a sadly tangled af- 
fair; our ways run out into darkness; we can no- 
where find healing for our possessed children, we 
have brought them to the disciples and they do 
nothing for us; and in our perplexity, cur dis- 
tress, our sorrow, we are going away. We think 
we have tried everything; but there is one thing 
we have not tried, we have not waited for Jesus. 
He is up there on the mountain, but if we wait he 
will come to us; our prayers will draw him 
down and then if we meet him in whole- 
hearted self-surrender, he will heal us. Our 
difficulty, for which we have found no help 
on earth, will be no difficulty to him. But be- 
ware lest we meet him with an "if." Then he can 



I AM THE TRUTH 59 

not help at all. That faith which is not faith, but 
the despair that is willing to try the last thing that 
is suggested, will not avail us. We must put our- 
selves and our need whole-heartedly and without 
reserve into his hands. Then he will come to us in 
the power of Incarnate God; then he will heal our 
lame and our blind and cast out our devils and 
raise our dead, then will he show us his light and 
his truth and lead us and bring us to his holy hill 
and to his dwelling. Life is so plain and easy 
when once we have trusted in him without reserve ; 
when we cease to think of the morrow, and cast 
all our care on him, knowing that he careth for us. 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may not falter in our trust in Jesus. 
That we may receive his truth and guide our lives 
by it without withholding anything. 

O Almighty and Everlasting God, who didst 
give to thine Apostles grace truly to believe and 
preach thy word; grant, we beseech thee, unto us 
thy servants, to love that word which they be- 
lieved, and faithfully to receive the same; through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. 



Very wonderful is the universal belief in God. 
Men everywhere have sought after him and found 
him. It is comparatively unimportant that they 



60 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

imaged their belief in God in strange forms; that 
they divided God, so to say, into a multitude of 
gods; that they endowed him with their own qual- 
ities, and thought that 'lie was such an one as 
themselves." The important thing is not that they 
interpreted their experience of the universe crudely 
or grotesquely, but that they were so sure of the 
meaning of their experience, that back of the shift- 
ing phenomena of the world they saw God, — saw 
that this world is not self-existent and that its in- 
completeness and unsatisfactoriness implied that 
which would explain and complete it. The simple 
inference that the uncultivated man made from the 
world to God is of course unsatisfactory, indeed,, 
childish to the cultured man of to-day. But the 
cultured man of to-day is the dupe of his own in- 
tellectual subtlety. Though we may not be able 
to prove it, the inference from the world to an in- 
telligent Creator is the only inference that gives the 
world any meaning or life any significance. This 
primitive guess, if you like so to call it, has been- 
abundantly justified in that it has kept man in the 
belief that the world is a spiritual system, and on 
the whole saved him from the degradation of 
materialism. 

To me, perhaps the most wonderful of all man's 
instinctive beliefs, that is, beliefs arrived at with- 
out a basis of experience, is the belief in his own 



I AM THE TRUTH 6 1 

perfectibility. All along man has had a vision of 
human perfection, the dream of a perfect man. 
Whether he has placed his dream in the past — in 
some lost Eden or vanished Golden Age — or in the 
future, as the ideal for which he is working, he has 
believed that he is now imperfect but capable of 
perfection. He has found his present always un- 
satisfying, unsatisfying, I mean, as an expression 
of himself. He might and ought to be better; he 
has in him the possibilities of greater things. This 
conviction has included most often the conviction 
that God meant him to be better, and that his pres- 
ent state spells failure and sin. He expects that 
sometime his vision of perfect man will become 
reality. How are we to account for this insistent, 
haunting conviction, this persistence of the belief 
in a perfection he had confessedly never seen? I 
believe it to be the pressure of the Divine that is 
in man because he is the child of God, made in his 
image, after his likeness, — the attempt of God to 
raise man to be the more perfect medium of his 
self-expresssion. All nature is but the clothing of 
a divine thought. And in man that thought strug- 
gles to make itself vocal and intelligible. 

Thus it was that when God's Thought, his Lo- 
gos, expressed itself in Christ, man recognized the 
embodiment of his dream, the justification of his 
vision. Here was what he had been certain of — 



62 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

human perfection; one who is Perfect Man be- 
cause he is perfectly united to God. The instant 
and abiding fascination of the Christ lies in the 
fact, we are told, that he is so perfectly, so ideally 
human. That is true if by being thus ideally hu- 
man we mean that man's conception of his perfec- 
tion includes the thought that the perfect man is 
such, not by the completeness of his animal nature, 
but by the perfection of his spirit, so that it is the 
means of union and communion with his God. 
God is in all men, but attains perfect self-expres- 
sion in the One Perfect Man who is Christ. And 
he in turn is the earnest and promise of the new 
advance for humanity, in that through him, and in 
him, it is now possible for all men to be united with 
their Father who is in heaven. In Christ we 
recognize a revelation, an unfolding, of the mean- 
ing and purpose of God. 

Before the Incarnation of our Lord there had 
been a revelation of God. There had been that dif- 
fused and indistinct revelation in virtue of which 
man had become conscious of God's presence in the 
universe and had sought to learn and to do his 
will, — that presence that they had felt in flower 
and grass, in the purling brook and the majesty of 
the ocean, in the glory of flower-strewn meadows 
and the awe of snow-crowned mountain peaks : 
that insistent self-assertion of God which they had 



I AM THE TRUTH 63 

experienced in the restlessness of their moral na- 
ture and the trouble of their conscience. There 
had been for some a clearer revelation in 
the words of Prophet and Psalmist, men who had 
declared themselves to have known God, to 
have met him face to face, and to have been sent 
by him as the revealers of his will. They had seen — 
but of what God was like there is no report — only 
of the splendor of a garment of light, of a dim 
form seen through incense clouds, the gleam of a 
pavement of sapphire, the passing of a throne borne 
by cherubim, a voice speaking out of the heart of 
the storm. But they brought an intelligible mes- 
sage, the tenor of which justified itself to the con- 
sciences of men, a message of mingled hope and 
fear. It was the revelation of a divine purity and 
a divine justice which was of itself a rebuke to sin ; 
a call to repentance, a stimulant to holiness. It 
centered about the word Father, and called men 
by the name of children, and thrilled with the love 
that that relation means. But the Father was the 
high and Holy One who inhabited eternity, and the 
awful obligation of sonship was, "Be ye holy as I 
am holy." 

And then came the Christ, and on his lips revela- 
tion — the message of the Father — takes a new form 
and a new accent. We catch the difference in his 
own assertion about himself : "I am the truth." He 



64 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

presents himself to us as the embodiment of the 
truth of God. Here was God, seen no longer 
through the refracting medium of instinctive in- 
ferences, or the interpretation of dream and vision, 
but presented to man in the only way he can under- 
stand him, in an Incarnate life. The character of 
God is seen in action. Christ does not tell the 
truth about God ; He is the truth. He is not theory 
but fact. He is therefore able to solve the doubts 
and unweave the perplexities that cling about 
men's thought of God. Men could say to him : 
"Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us," 
having perfect confidence in him. And he could 
wonderfully point to himself as embodying the 
knowledge they seek: "He that hath seen me hath 
seen ^he Father." 

So men, after centuries of guesses and infer- 
ences, of blunders and partial success, can know 
what God i?. God is what Jesus is. Jestiv shows, 
not what God is in himself, but what he is to us, 
which is the thing we want to know and need to 
know. When we are studying him we are study- 
ing the Divine Truth. Men could not be with him, 
they cannot study him now, without having their 
thought of God clarified. And there was so much, 
and still is, that needs clarifying. We feel that the 
men who passed from the schools of Scribe> and 
Pharisees to associate with Jesus must have felt 



I AM THE TRUTH 65 

that they were passing into a new world — a world 
where values were altered and stresses were 
Changed, and all things were become new. The 
pressure of invisible law — law that haunted and 
dogged men's footsteps that it might catch them in 
its net — was exchanged for the love and sympathy 
that treats life comprehendingly and tenderly, and 
"willeth not that any should perish. ,, One does not 
feel otherwise to-day as one passes froi?: the lec- 
ture room where the existence of "The Absolute" 
is triumphantly established, or "The Essential At- 
tributes," of God are explained, to the quiet of the 
Gospels where the truth about God is brougln home 
to us when Jesus says : "I and the Father are one," 
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," or, 
"The Father himself loveth you." That God is the 
high and Holy One who inhabited eternity, the 
transcendent Creator, is not denied : but the stress 
is on the immanent God who is manifested in 
Jesus. This God is the Great Seeker. In Jesus he 
comes to us, and abides with us and in us. "We 
will come to him and make our abode with him. ,, 
The revelation of God's nature carries us even be- 
yond Fatherhood, for "God is love.'' 

In this revelation which is in Jesus not only is 

man's thought about God cleared, but his thought 

about himself. What is revealed to him, first of 

all, is not the darkness and horror of sin, but the 

(6) 



66 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

splendor of his inheritance. Man is the child of 
the Father who is love. The attitude of God to- 
ward him is that which he perceives in the attiiude 
of Jesus towards these multitudes who throng him, 
bringing to him their sick and impotent and luna- 
tics. He sees God's dealings with him when he 
sees Jesus having compassion upon the multitude, 
when he sees him taking little children in his arms, 
when he hears him speaking the words of pardon 
over the bed of the paralyzed man. We feel that 
those "Publicans and Sinners" who followed our 
Lord, followed so closely, so insistently, so hope- 
fully, because for the first time they were learning 
that they were not abhorrent to God and outcasts 
from the kingdom of the future. The love of God 
as Jesus manifested it was a love for them — warm, 
deep, passionate. They were the Lost Sheep and 
the Prodigal Sons of his parables ; and so thinking 
of God, so seeing God in Jesus, they took hope 
for themselves, and conceived the possibility of liv- 
ing to God's thought for them. For it is hope that 
leads men to repentance; and when they perceived 
that God still hoped for them they began to hope 
for themselves. They were not made careless of 
sin ; they were not less conscious of being sinners, 
but more. For they now read the truth of their 
lives, not through the eyes of Pharisaic rigorists, 
at whose sneers all their manhood revolted, but 



I AM THE TRUTH 67 

through the words of one pitiful and tender, 
whose very tenderness revealed to them the mean- 
ing, the blackness, of their sin. Hatred anc* dis- 
gust repel the sinner; it is only love that draws. 

What I want to make clear, is the actual effect 
of the revelation of God in Christ — what is the 
impression it has made on human life. The eas- 
iest and most decisive way of finding what this im- 
pression was is to open our New Testaments. If 
we attempt a classification of the books of the New 
Testament with a view to ascertaining the effect of 
Christ, we shall find that those books fall easily in- 
to three classes. First the synoptics; that is, the 
Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke. 
Second the Epistles of St. Paul. Third the Gospel 
of St. John. No doubt the rest of the New Testa- 
ment might be ranged under one or the other of 
these classes, but for our present purpose it is un- 
necessary to extend the classification further. 

If one takes the first three Gospels and reads 
them over several times for the purpose of getting 
a fresh impression of their presentations of the 
life of our Lord, one rises from the reading tre- 
mendously impressed by the uniqueness of our 
Lord's humanity. Here is one in all respects 
"Like as we are, yet without sin.'' The qualities 
we have learned to admire in man are there in their 
highest potency; and there are others, that per- 



68 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

haps, we have not learned to admire, but we are 
sure, as we see them in our Lord, that they are al- 
together admirable. We are quite certain that 
here is the ideal of man ; that perfect expression of 
what man had all along felt that he ought to be, 
that we have already noted as one of the mysteries 
of human thought. Christ moves on the pages of 
the Synoptics through all the setting of his life, 
from its idyllic opening to its tragic close, complete- 
ly the master of every situation in which we find 
him. There is nothing tentative or experimental 
about him. He meets each situation which life 
presents to him with unfailing resource of thought 
and action. No crisis is so difficult as to cause 
him a moment's perplexity; there is no plot of his 
enemies of which he does not see the meaning at a 
glance. There is no situation, whether the out- 
come of human sin or folly or misfortune, which 
he does not meet readily : no one ever asks his help 
or counsel and finds him unprepared. And we do 
not feel that this is a matter of quick-wittedness or 
of careful training or of acquired insight, but is 
the natural outcome of his perfect humanity — that 
we fail where he succeeds because we are defec- 
tive where he is perfect. We have never before 
seen perfect man, but we are certain that we see 
him now — that this is the way in which all men 
would act if they were perfect. 



I AM THE TRUTH 69 

But it comes to us, too, as we turn again and 
again the pages of these Gospels, that there is an 
element in the character and action of Christ which 
is beyond anything that we can attribute to human 
perfection. And this element is not simply or 
chiefly the miraculous element — we can conceive 
that perfect man would have some such command 
over the resources of the natural world as Christ 
displays — it is rather a growing sense that we gain 
of the nearness and closeness of his life to God. 
This more-than-human element in the Christ is the 
result of the intimacy of his union with God. In- 
deed, what we are dealing with is not union but 
unity. He has not risen through the purification 
of his nature to union with God, but he is God — 
he and the Father are one. We could infer that, 
with some hesitation, from the first three Gospels 
without the explicit testimony of the fourth. 

Turn now to another strand of New Testament 
experience, that which is embodied in the writings 
of St. Paul ; and remember that the writings of St. 
Paul precede the Gospels and represent an inde- 
pendent experience of our Lord. In the experi- 
ence of St. Paul the historical Jesus of Nazareth 
plays almost no part. I do not at all mean that 
St. Paul was ignorant of the facts of our Lord's 
earthly life or considered them of no importance. 
He indeed stresses as of primary importance our 



JO THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Lord's death and Resurrection. But I mean his 
experience is not the outcome of meditation upon 
the history, but is the result of a personal relation 
to our Lord himself. The Jesus whom St. Paul 
presents to us is indeed the same Jesus who was 
born at Bethlehem and crucified on Calvary; but 
in St. Paul's experience he is Risen and Ascended 
and seated at the Right Hand of the Father. The 
Risen Jesus is central in the thought ard life of 
St. Paul, as one always present to him, very life 
of his life. 

Christianity to St. Paul is a matter of having 
found the Way, and being in Christ. The "con- 
versation" of the Christian is "in heaven" where 
his "life is hid with Christ in God." Jesus is the 
truth of God, and we know the truth "in Jesus." 
It is our experience of the Living Christ, not our 
memories of the dead Christ, which St. Paul 
stresses. To his religion that experience is cen- 
tral. 

Turn to another strand of New Testament 
thought, this time to the Gospel of St. John. St. 
John writes long after the Synoptics and St. Paul 
have finished their work. The facts of our Lord's 
human life, and the facts of spiritual experience 
which are the outcome of the Christian's relation 
to the Living and Ascended Christ, are both fam- 
iliar to the Christian consciousness. What St. John 



I AM THE TRUTH 7 1 

writes is less a history of our Lord's life, than a med- 
itation upon it. In his writings we see the strand of 
history and the strand of spiritual experience inter- 
twined. St. John dwells upon the historical facts of 
the life of Jesus, but his presentation of them is 
colored by his experience of the Risen and As- 
cended Jesus. The depth and intimacy of his 
knowledge of our Lord's mind and thought is de- 
rived, we feel, from the closeness of his inter- 
course with him in his heavenly state. Even St. 
John could not have written such a book on the 
morrow of the Resurrection ; it is the ripe fruit of 
many years of spiritual living in Christ. Yet we 
feel, do we not? as we rise from meditation on St. 
John's gospel, that this is the truest, that is, the 
most complete, presentation of the truth of Christ. 
"That which was from the beginning, which we 
have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which 
we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, 
of the word of life . . . that which w r e have seen 
and heard declare we unto you." But the seeing 
and the hearing and the handling have been en- 
riched and interpreted by many years of medita- 
tion and contemplation and spiritual appropriation, 
before they have been written in the wonderful 
pages of the Fourth Gospel. The writer has not 
only gained in spiritual apprehension as he dwelt 
lovingly on the days when, as the disciple whom 



7 a THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Jesus loved, he lived in closest intimacy with his 
Master; he has not only gone deep, by devout 
thought, into the meaning of the work that had be- 
held and the sorrows that he in some sense shared ; 
but he who leaned upon the Master's breast at the 
Supper, and stood watching his agony upon the 
Cross, and was a witness to his empty tomb, has 
also seen the heaven open and beheld the Master 
whom he had known and loved as an earthly 
friend, throned in glory, the center and object of 
the worship of angels and archangels and all the 
company of heaven, and has been the messenger of 
the Risen Jesus to all generations of his Church on 
earth. This knowledge, this experience, this truth, 
is reflected back on the pages of the Gospel till 
they glow with the jewelled light of the heavenly 
world. 

As we come back from this imperfect glance at 
the New Testament interpretation of the life of 
our Lord we necessarily ask ourselves if there is 
anything in our own experience which at all cor- 
responds with the Apostolic experience. And I 
think we can find that this is indeed the case. Any 
Christian experience that approaches completeness 
will be found to be as complete an experience as was 
that of St. John. There is in it a certain intellec- 
tual element of knowledge about Christ which is 
founded upon our study of the gospel. We have 



I AM THE TRUTH 73 

become familiar with the history of Jesus of Naz- 
areth, we have learned to see in him the mirror of 
human perfection. The incidents of that life are 
part of our daily thought, the food of our daily 
meditation. We have learned to guide our life by 
his teaching and to feel that the imitation of Christ 
is essential to the Christian. That is one aspect of 
our Christian experience; but if the experience is 
real it does not stop there. There mingles with it 
and colors it and vivifies it an experience of 
Jesus as he is now; an experience of Jesus, living 
and ascended, and through his glorified humanity 
entering into union and communion with us. This 
is what we are wont to call our spiritual experi- 
ence, that is, the certainty that we have that we are 
in Christ and he in us. This certainty of a present 
action of Christ in us attends and underlies all our 
spiritual life ; indeed there is no need of the limit- 
ation, it underlies all our acts. This conscious- 
ness of Jesus as the stimulating and directing 
power of our lives (and we need not in any case 
pause to analyze an act to find how much of our 
certainty is due to our memory of his teaching and 
how much to our Lord's direct action) is con- 
sciousness of him as the Truth. The reference of 
all our lives to him means that we find in him the 
Truth, and that by that discovery we are delivered 



74 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

from the bondage of error and are made free with 
the liberty of the children of God. 

This reliance upon Christ as known in our ex- 
perience lies at the root of our practical, every- 
day conduct. It affords an ever-ready reference 
for the details of conduct. Such reference be- 
comes instinctive and almost unnoted to such a 
degree that often times we should have some diffi- 
culty in explaining why we act in a certain way, so 
deeply hidden in our nature has become the ulti- 
mate ground for decision. It is not infrequent to 
find people alleging purely surface reasons for 
their conduct, reasons plainly thought of at the 
time, when it is clear that the true reason was a 
spiritual instinct born of their spiritual knowledge 
of the truth. One is confronted with the fact that 
one does not indulge in certain amusements or 
luxuries, and is asked abruptly to decide if they are 
right or wrong. And one finds the decision diffi- 
cult because one is obliged to shift one's canons of 
judgment to another plane. One is obliged to put 
oneself on the plane of one's questioner and base 
an answer on reasons that one never uses. We 
find it difficult to translate our feelings of attrac- 
tion or repulsion into the rough and ready rules of 
good and bad. We are not always conscious of 
the judgment bad concerning that which we avoid, 
or of the judgment goo d, in regard to that which 



I AM THE TRUTH 7 5 

we do. A law, a rule, a maxim, can be, at best, 
only a very crude test, and a very imperfect guide. 
An author cannot always tell why he uses one word 
rather than another; the rules of grammar admit- 
ted either; but he feels that the word he used is 
the right one. Style is a matter of feeling rather 
than of rule. The painter cannot tell why he 
heightened that light or put a little more purple in- 
to that shadow, but he feels that it had to be done 
— as it stood it made him a little uneasy. You 
do not see any difference, but he feels that there 
is one. So in the shaping of our conduct, the 
choice of our words, the selection of our amuse- 
ments, we may find it difficult to produce a rule on 
demand; but we feel that there is a difference. 
And this difference, in the case of the Christian, is 
most likely no producible law of God or maxim of 
the gospel, such as the critic demands, but a 
feeling of the mind of Jesus. Our decisions in 
matters of truth and beauty and goodness are only 
partially the result of a knowledge of the teaching 
of Jesus; they are rather the result of an experi- 
ence of him. Such instinctive decisions grow more 
delicate and refined as experience broadens and 
deepens, and also more difficult to give an account 
of even to ourselves. But if we can give no ade- 
quate account of them, we hold them in absolute 
certainty, we follow them without any shadow of 



76 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

fear. We are certain that in such decisions the 
Spirit of Christ is with us, and that we have his 
mind. The law may have left us its freedom ; but 
we are concerned only with the liberty wherewith 
Christ has made us free. 

I suppose that at times we all find that the rules 
of conduct of morals, that we have learned, break 
down in this sense — that we find them inadequate 
to guide life. It is only a life of very elemental ex- 
periences that can be measured by rule. It is the 
fact, indeed, that the mechanical measurements of 
material things are but approximate: the ideal re- 
sult we get by mathematics will not quite fit any 
concrete case. In applying the result to materials 
there must be some allowance made which repre- 
sents a lack of correspondence between formula 
and fact. So in the application of rules to life 
there has to be an allowance made for the infinite 
variety of life. The rule is invariable, life always 
varies. This is the perplexity of the unspiritual 
person — he finds the rule breaks down and there is 
nothing to supplement it with. One of the marked 
differences between the unspiritual and the spirit- 
ual person lies precisely here; that the spiritual 
person has back of and beyond all rules a sense of 
conformity, a certainty of the correspondence of 
his life with the mind of Christ or of its failure so 
to do. The unspiritual person has no instinct of 



I AM THE TRUTH 77 

conformity. If I am asked, how this sense of con- 
formity is attained, I should say that it is the out- 
come of the life of union, the result of living in 
Christ. We appropriate the point of view, the 
mind, of those with whom we are intimate. You 
see this manner of imitation in the child who un- 
consciously appropriates the gestures, the tricks of 
speech, of father or friend. There was no con- 
scious learning; it is just a matter of association, 
of intimacy. The way in which our Christian lives 
are shaped is, too, a matter of being tilled with the 
Spirit of Christ, and the extent in which his life is, 
often unconsciously, repeated in ours. I do not 
mean that there is no need of effort; there is need 
of constant effort to appropriate the "truth as it is 
in Jesus.'' But if our effort is to be successful, it 
must carry us beyond conscious imitation, it must 
spring out of personal love which is the true me- 
dium through which we arrive at the understand- 
ing of another's mind. 

I am of course speaking of those things that are 
subtle and delicate, lying outside the rough distinc- 
tions, true and false, right or wrong. I have in 
mind principally that sort of selection within the 
allowable which becomes a necessity to those 
whose mind is to press on toward sanctity. We 
think of the lives of those who are approaching 
sanctity as becoming more and more simplified. 



7& THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

There is a process of detachment going on within 
them, which results in their separating themselves 
increasingly from the ordinary interests of life. 
The circumstances of their lives may not admit of 
an exterior separation, but there is a separation of 
the inner life which becomes "hid with Christ." 
The essential interests of life become fewer, 
less and less do they cling to things. It is 
enough for them that they see Jesus, and their in- 
terest in their fellows is that they see Jesus in 
them. Hence the curious phenomena that they 
have not less interest in the world, or are less 
given to good works, but their interest and activ- 
ity is intensified. A St. Vincent de Paul or a 
Father Stanton give themselves utterly to minis- 
try just because their lives are simplified to the ex- 
tent that they have no interest but Jesus. To them 
Jesus is constantly manifesting himself in his mem- 
bers, and the service of the members is the service 
of him. This is the true social service, that co- 
operates with the manifestation of the life of 
Jesus in the least of his members and strives that 
the truth which is in Jesus may prevail in all the 
dark places of the world. It is not men who are 
bound to material interests who can do this, but 
those whose spirit of detachment has freed all their 
powers, to the end of their utter consecration. 
For to see the meaning of Jesus is to see the 



I AM THE TRUTH 79 

truth about this world — that it is the one sphere of 
his activity with which we are now concerned — 
the sphere in which is being built the Body of his 
Incarnate Life. His activity has for its end his 
self-manifestation in the lives of men. If we have 
once grasped this there is no danger of our being 
slack in well doing. This world becomes the stage 
of a fascinating drama wherein we see the ven- 
tures, the victories of faith, and its disasters, 
too. One's association with the truth, one's sense 
of personal responsibility, in guarding it, one's 
sight of the pitiful life of men who so much need 
it give one that sense of mission which lies back of 
the Apostles, "woe is me, if I preach not the gos- 
pel." The truth of God — "the truth as it is in 
Jesus" — is the only thing which can bring any per- 
manent relief or comfort to the lives of men. The 
remedies that we are applying so abundantly and 
so hopefully to the ills of the world to-day, are 
merely palliatives. The trouble with the world is 
that it needs the light of truth to guide it into 
peace with God. Our vocation as Christians is to 
let that light shine through us "that men may see 
our good works and glorify our Father in heaven." 
We must shine : it must be impossible to doubt that 
we, at least, have found the truth that solves the 
problems of life and puts us in harmony with God. 
The Christian whose grasp of the truth is vague and 



80 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

uncertain, whose testimony lacks the note of per- 
sonal conviction, who shrinks from the open and 
joyous profession of it before men, is falling far 
short of the obligations of life which he has re- 
ceived from the truth abundantly, that he might 
give it freely. We cannot expect the world to be 
converted to a faith which is constantly apologetic 
and asks for bare tolerance. It will only be con- 
verted to a faith that is so certain that it dares to 
stand alone before a hostile world. 



I AM THE LIFE. 

Let us listen to the zvords of our Lord — 
I Am the Life. 

And let us try to picture to ourselves — 

/^\UR Lord and his disciples meeting the funeral 
^\/ procession outside the gate of Nain. The 
sadness of the scene is brought home to 
us in the words, "he is the only son of 
his mother, and she was a widow. ,, Her 
bereavement had called out the one human 
source of helpfulness — sympathy. "And much 
people of the city was with her." We see 
them, these good friends, offering what words they 
could, and where there were no words, by silent 
looks and hand-pressure, making their fellow- 
feeling known. How helpless we feel at such times 
whether in word or in silence. Nothing could 

81 
(7) 



82 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

help much while the silent body was borne there 
before the mother's eyes on the open bier. In the 
isolation of their grief they would have paid no at- 
tention to this other group coming towards the 
city. Could they have known what was there for 
them how they would have hastened their steps. 
Into the midst of the mother's grief, God was 
coming. God can be so near, and we know it not. 
"And he said unto her, Weep not. And he came 
and touched the bier; and they that bare him stood 
still." Their first impression would have been 
one of unauthorized interference ; but that would 
pass as their wondering eyes rested on the face of 
him "who had compassion on her." The grave 
kindness and sympathy of his look would them- 
selves show that he was not acting without reason. 
And then the word of power: "Young man, I say 
unto thee, Arise. ,, What can express the glad 
wonder of the mother's heart as "he that was dead 
sat up, and began to speak." In her heart there 
was no place for the astonishment and fear that 
fell on the others. She can have had but one 
feeling; a passionate love that goes out to her boy 
which would for the moment make her oblivious 
to all else, even the presence of him who had 
brought her child back to life. "And he delivered 
him to his mother." 



I AM THE LIFE 83 

Consider, first — 

That we come to the contemplation of this scene 
with the knowledge and experience of our Lord 
that centuries have given. We have learned to 
think of him as of one who has absolute mastery 
over all life and death. What he says of his own 
life, "I have power over my life to lay it down and 
to take it again," extends to all other lives. He is 
the Prince of Life. What fascinates us about the 
story is not so much the exemplification of a well- 
known truth, as the circumstances under which his 
power is here exercised. We get used to the 
thought of the divine power; we never get so far 
as to grow cold to the wonder of the divine sym- 
pathy. This is what is constantly new to us : That 
the divine power is impelled to action by the divine 
sympathy. It is the same lesson that we learn as 
we stand with the three chosen disciples in the 
chamber of Jairus, and see Jesus take the maid by 
the hand, and say to her, "Arise." Or when again 
we stand by the weeping sisters at the tomb of 
Lazarus, and hear him say, "Lazarus, Come forth. ,, 
There are but few miracles in the whole Gospel 
record behind which we cannot read the sympathy 
of God. The thought that we get is; That the 
power of our Lord, his mastery over life and death, 
is a power that is directed by sympathy and love; 



84 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

that it is called into activity by the needs of the 
children of men. And we can conclude, can we 
not? that it is not a power called out by one need 
here and there, but that it is always being exercised 
with reference to our lives, whether we perceive it 
or not. It may have been that the same day an- 
ther body was borne out of the gate of Nain, and 
no hand touched the bier to stay it as it went to 
the place of burial ; but none the less the sympathy 
and love of the Lord went with it, and those who 
followed, weeping. The great thing is not to see 
the power of God, but to be sure of his love. 

Consider, second — 

That the presence of our Lord in our lives to- 
day is the resurrection of dead things. His touch 
is a vivifying touch. There are in all our lives, 
dead or dying things; things that range from the 
soul dead in trespasses and sins, to the discourage- 
ment and weariness of waning hopes, unsatisfied 
longings, perishing aspirations. There are mo- 
ments when our spiritual life seems stale and flat 
and meaningless; when the sense of what we have 
not accomplished over-shadows our positive gain. 
It is so great a thing to be a Christian and we have 
made so little out of it. We had hoped so much, 
and to-day we see our dead hopes borne out of 
the gate of the city. But if we so will it, they need 



I AM THE LIFE 8$, 

not go to their burial. There is one that can bid 
the bier stay and can speak over them the word cf 
life; one whose sympathy and love lingers over 
these seemingly dead things and is nearer to them 
than to our successes, because they heed him more. 
Perhaps our spiritual life has grown dim because 
we have forgotten how much it depends on him. 
Spiritual vitality is maintained only so long as we 
are in energetic contact with the source of all life. 
More energetic life is closer clinging to Jesus with 
the clasp that will not let him go until he bless us. 
In all our experience, however dark or disastrous, 
he is there by the side, within the reach of our 
hands, within the touch of our faith, within the ap- 
peal of our needs. He will not pass, if we want 
him. "I am the life," he says ; that life, which en- 
tering within our life, shall become a living foun- 
tain of mercy vitalizing all the stagnant back- 
waters of our experience. If you will bring your 
failures to him, you shall have them restored from 
the dead, and transformed into successes. 

Let us, then pray — 

For deepened spiritual life. For the touch cf 
faith that will enable us to lay hold on eternal life. 

O God, Who by Thine Only-begotten Son hast 
overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of 
everlasting life; grant us, we beseech Thee, that; 



86 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

the power of Thy Son's Resurrection, may be the 
renewing of our spirit, and the resurrection of 
our souls from the dead; through the same Thy 
Son Jesus Christ our Lord. 

"That which was made in him was life, and the 
life was the light of men." St. John describes our 
Lord as the Divine and Eternal Logos through 
whom all things exist, entering the world of hu- 
manity in the very act of creation, and by the im- 
partation of himself to man making men the par- 
takers of his own Divine Life. This life in man 
is converted into light — the inextinguishable light 
of the Divine Presence — which struggles with the 
mysterious darkness of evil, but proves itself un- 
conquerable : "The darkness overcame it not.'' He 
is the True Light which lighteneth every man who 
comes into the world. But though the darkness 
could not conquer, it effected ignorance and pro- 
cured the rejection of the Light by many who 
were the Light's own. Then the Logos drew 
nearer to humanity, veiled himself in the garment 
of man's flesh, became Incarnate and dwelt among 
us, and to as many as received him the darkness 
broke, and they became in a new and higher sense 
God's sons, and beheld the glory of the Incarnate 
God and abide in him forever. 

The result of the self-impartation of God In- 



I AM THE LIFE <&7 

carnate to men whereby men receive power to be- 
come the sons of God, St. John calls eternal life. 
Eternal life, therefore, is not an indefinite exten- 
sion of the natural life under new conditions — it is 
not the progress and perfecting of that natural life 
through conformity to the will of God, as you 
might cultivate a plant more and more, till its blos- 
soms become larger and fairer — it is rather a new 
gift to man due to a new action of God, a new self- 
manifestation of God, so that man can now be 
called a new Creation — "a new Creation in Christ 
Jesus." Man is thereby lifted to a new state of 
being, that state which we call spiritual, not be- 
cause he is animated by new desires, or has gained 
a new outlook on life, or become possessed of a 
new set of principles, but because he has had com- 
municated to him a new energy in that he has been 
made one with Christ and the life of Christ func- 
tions through him. As the mysterious life of the 
body makes itself known by its manifestation in 
each member of the body, giving it the power to 
do its work ; so the life of Incarnate God, into whom 
we are taken and of whom we are made members, 
manifests itself in each child of his — manifests it- 
self in the acts which we call spiritual and which 
are the reactions of our spiritual nature to the 
stimulus of his presence. 
This life of the Incarnate which is imparted to 



88 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

us functions in us even though we are unconscious 
of its presence and the meaning of the consequent 
actions. I talk with a boy about his religious life* 
He tells me that he goes beyond the routine pray- 
ers which have been taught him and says prayers 
"in his own words." He cannot give me any clear 
notion of the meaning of that, but I know. I know 
that the indwelling presence of Jesus is awakening 
in him spiritual desire which expresses itself in the 
beginning of the life of prayer: he has uncon- 
sciously translated the impulse Godward that his 
soul guest gives him into the terms of his own 
need. The boy tells me that he would like to 
make his communion more often. I do not push 
him to say why — he could most likely not put the 
"why" into words; but I know why. The Incar- 
nate God he has received in his communions is 
drawing him into closer intimacy, is making him- 
self felt with a tender attractiveness that is trans- 
lated in the boy's consciousness as a dim love. He 
tells me that he has overcome the impulses of the 
flesh, and I know that the all-pure Jesus is strength- 
ening him against temptation and imparting to> 
him the love of purity. 

In later life we find the same phenomena in an 
increased attraction to the things that are spiritual. 
Even here it is not necessary that we should have 
clearness and distinctness in the analysis of our 



I AM THE LIFE 89 

spiritual state — that we should be over-anxious 
about the ''why''. To attempt to find a clear line 
of demarcation between our mind and the mind of 
Christ often leads to perplexity and scrupulous- 
ness. It is enough to recognize, in a general way, 
that we are being led to increased love of spiritual 
activity, to increased eagerness for service. It is 
well that we can perceive in ourselves, underlying 
whatever are our spiritual activities, an increased 
consciousness of the presence and action of our 
Lord. 

In connection with this it is perhaps well for us 
to scrutinize our life of prayer. It is in that, I 
think, that the indwelling Life of our Lord com- 
monly manifests itself. It vivifies our prayers, fill- 
ing them with a sweetness and joy. Our life of 
prayer began most likely when we began the prac- 
tice of meditation. Perhaps it has continued at 
that stage. That, I fancy, represents the high- 
water mark in prayer of a good many serious 
Christian lives. Why is this? We certainly ought 
to be able to push on beyond meditation. And no 
doubt many do by changing what is still formally 
meditation into another state of prayer. Of 
course the limitations of meditation as a form of 
prayer are obvious. We need, no doubt, the dis- 
cipline of it, the training and the application of the 
mental faculties to a given subject But in many 



9° THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

cases, at least, it becomes too completely an intel- 
lectual exercise and reduces the action of the feel- 
ings to a minimum, and, what is more serious, 
keeps us so busy with our own thoughts that we 
have no attention for anything else. We are alto- 
gether given over to the exercise of memory and 
intellect and will. The result is that we are not in 
an altogether receptive attitude of soul. We make 
so much noise with our own speaking that we are 
unable to hear God when he tries to speak to us. 

I wish to be understood as not in the least de- 
gree undervaluing meditation. In its own place it 
is invaluable as a spiritual help and discipline. 
The practice of daily meditation extending over 
years, it may be, has built up many a soul in thor- 
ough knowledge and well-grounded experience. 
What I want to insist on now is that, assuming the 
value of meditation, it still does not cover the 
whole field of prayer, nor is it the variety of prayer 
at which we can afford to stop. The predominance 
of the intellect in it, which is no doubt good for 
most of us in a certain phase of spiritual develop- 
ment, is the limitation that needs to be removed if 
prayer is to mean for us the exercise of all our 
spiritual powers in close union with our Lord: if 
it is to mean a state in which our Life is to be ad- 
mitted to our lives to work his will in them. To 
put it another way, we need a form of prayer in 



I AM THE LIFE 9 1 

which the affections play the dominant role, in 
which our attitude toward God is that of receptiv- 
ity. 

That alternative form which I am suggesting 19 
what is technically known as affective prayer. 
Many of us, no doubt, have passed into it uncon- 
sciously while we thought we were making medi- 
tations; for, fortunately, we are taught by the 
Spirit more than by man, and the Spirit leads us 
in his own way to the acquisition of his gifts. 
After all, the rules of the spiritual life are nothing 
more than the schematization of our spiritual ex- 
perience which comes, not because of the rules, but 
is born of the action of God on our souls. But the 
rules are valuable in that they are an attempt to 
grasp and render intelligible universal spiritual ex- 
perience, that the individual may order his own 
experience in accord with it. Affective prayer is 
that form of prayer in which our own activity is 
reduced to a minimum and the activity of God up- 
on us becomes the essential feature of the prayer- 
state. It differs not very much from the Practice 
of the Presence of God, which is one form of it. 

It consists of putting one's self in the presence 
of God and submitting ourselves to him and wait- 
ing for his action. As the mind will work, whether 
we want it to or no, we occupy it with some little 
thought of God, of his goodness or mercy; we 



9* THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

think of some incident in our Lord's life, of his 
birth or his agony; we fill the mind with some 
phrase of the Creed or the Lord's prayer. In a 
way this is simply to recollect the mind, to gather 
the attention on a single point. Then instead of 
proceeding to develop this theme intellectually, af- 
ter the manner of meditation, we dwell upon it emo- 
tionally, by way of brief acts of faith, hope and 
love. The more the intellectual element can be 
suppressed the better: the more intense the steady 
vision of God, the embracing of him by a single 
act of the spirit as the object of our desire, the 
more helpful the prayer. Our whole attempt is 
to say and do as little as possible ourselves, just 
offering ourselves to the action of God. Think of 
yourself, for instance, as kneeling before the 
Crucifix or Tabernacle, and making a simple act 
of faith in our Lord's presence, holding the thought 
of that presence in your mind as long and as in- 
tensely as you can. As the mind tends to waver 
and stray and other thoughts intrude, prevent 
them by some half-spoken thought — "I am thine, 
Lord, receive me." "Jesus, my Lord, I thee 
adore." "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." 
There is an infinite range of subjects and af- 
fections by which the soul may be thus presented 
to the action of our Lord. But the essence of the 
matter is that we are receptive, expectant, wait- 



I AM THE LIFE 93 

ing; that we are believing and loving rather than 
seeking to learn. 

At first sight this form of prayer seems simpler 
and easier than meditation; in fact, that is not 
at all the case. It is much harder to keep the af- 
fections tense than the intellect. The persons who 
at the first attempt find it easier, do so because 
they have passed into a dreamy state in which 
there is no activity. But effective prayer, while 
it attempts to keep the soul passive to our Lord's 
action, is at the same time running to meet him, 
with powers that are thoroughly aroused. To 
dream is never to pray. 

This may seem rather a digression from our 
subject than an unfolding of it; but I do not think 
it so, and I have introduced it here because prayer, 
especially the more advanced forms of prayer, 
seem to me the most effective instruments that 
our Lord who is life uses to unite himself to us 
and transform his Life in us into Light. ''In his 
Life we see light." He becomes thus the inner 
guidance, the Inner Light of Mystics, the Way as 
well as the Goal, the sustaining power in the way 
to God. 

In the maturity of the Christian life, when com- 
munion with God has come to be, not an un-ana- 
lyzed phenomenon, but an understood fact, we 
come to rely on this indwelling presence, on the 



94 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Life which is Light, as our sustenance and sup- 
port in every event of life. The transition from 
immaturity to maturity is evidenced in two ways. 
First, in our immaturity we thought of God as "In 
heaven." Perhaps most Christians so think of him 
all the time. The notion of God with which 
Christians have been reproached, as that of "a 
big man who lives in another street," is near 
enough to the fact of many a man's thought to 
have its sting. God is a distant source of power 
to which we, on occasion, resort. But in maturity 
God is within us ; or, perhaps, we are in God. The 
sense of distance is abolished. In the second 
place, whereas we had thought of God as one to 
whom we might resort on special occasions, we 
now think of him as one necessarily concerned in 
every fact of our lives. It is not that experience 
occasionally requires God, but that he is the con- 
stant factor in an ever-changing experience. We de- 
pend on his help in a more intimate sense than we 
depend upon the help of our friends. In our 
prayers, in our communions, before the Blessed 
Sacrament, we find him; but we find him, too, in 
our room, in the street, in the country walk. And 
we learn to make use of him constantly in the 
latter situations. And it is the use of the Divine 
Presence in these that I would especially stress. 
As we walk down the street some morning we 



I AM THE LIFE 95 

are conscious of the Divine Presence filling it. 
This crowd of busy men and women going their 
several ways, intent upon their business or their 
pleasure, all unthinking as they are, of any Di- 
vine Presence at all, are God's children; all have 
in them some life which is a tiny spark, at least, 
of that Light which enlighteneth every man. God 
has come to them, his own, and their lives have 
been in some sort changed by that coming, whether 
they have received or rejected. And because he 
has given all these the power to become the Sons 
of God, there is a bond of interest between them 
and us. You share with them a nature which 
Christ has given his life to redeem. So they be- 
come interesting one by one. That group of lads 
in whom the brute nature speaks so loudly, that 
flamboyant girl, painted, powdered, dyed, with 
the lust of the flesh looking out of her bold eyes 
— they seem as far as possible removed from any- 
thing divine; yet they are "his own,'' though the 
knowledge of him has not yet penetrated to the 
dark places where their souls dwell. These are 
lives for tears. And those men there, whose hard 
faces, and scraps of their conversation that you 
catch, tell you that "they mind earthly things" — 
they are the most hopeless class of society, more 
hopeless than the hooligan or the harlot, yet you 
know that the power of the Light is more potent 



96 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

than the power of the Darkness, and that a man 
who sat at the seat of custom once left it to follow 
Christ. But your heart is heavy, and you find 
it difficult to hope for that dirty tramp to whom 
you nevertheless give a dime in forgetfulness of 
the behests of "organized charity," and you look 
out into the sunlit street hoping to find your 
vision in the sunlight. There is a woman in a 
motor with two little dogs on the seat beside her! 
She might well be the despair of God, if God ever 
despaired! But he never does. He is Life, Life 
in all these, Life struggling, striving to express 
itself in every soul that he has made. Even the 
woman in the motor with the little dogs that the 
ragged child on the pavement is staring at, the 
ragged child herself, all this bewildering crowd — 
the Life strives in and with them and is eager to 
find in them the means of its self-expression. Yes, 
God is in the many colored life of the streets, 
with its infinitely varied types and its startling 
contrasts, seeking to "come unto" them, for indeed 
they are "his own." 

He who takes God with him out into the world 
of his daily life, and applies God, as it were, as 
the key to all he sees, arrives at great interpreta- 
tive power. The deep emotions of the soul that 
are stirred by contact with the world become the 
medium of revelation. To the deep quiet of the 



I AM THE LIFE 97 

soul before the beauty of the sunset, its tumultuous 
beating at the sound of glorious music, its hush 
before some great tragedy, these give him glimpses 
of the "ways of God." Spiritual truths that have 
been taught to us, flash into significance, and start 
out clear and naked upon the page of life. We 
find God and the working of God everywhere, 
not in some intellectual creed of his omnipresence, 
but in the pages the Book of Life opens and in 
which we now read with understanding. It is not 
so much an intellectual process that has been go- 
ing on in us, the development of our powers of 
insight and observation, as the surrender of our 
powers. We have not at last mastered, at the ex- 
pense of much effort, the mind of Christ, but the 
mind of Christ has mastered us. And we come 
back to St. John to interpret to us what has hap- 
pened. "In him was life and the life was the 
light of men." As our Lord masters us we see, 
as it were, with his eyes. The Life that he is, is 
the Light by which we now see. "In his light 
we see light." 

I can fancy someone saying, 'That is all very 
well and is a very beautiful ideal, but it does not 
take place, at least with any frequency. I hardly 
recognize — 

Ah, that is another thing — recognise. To have 
a certain process going on, and to recognize, that 
(8) 



9^ THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

is, be able to analyze and give an account of it, 
are two things. But the process is going on in all 
Christians whether they note it or not. If you think 
over what I have been saying you will recognize 
it in some stage of advancement in yourself. There 
are in your experience moments when your aver- 
age way of taking life presents itself as inadequate 
and unsatisfying. Usually you accept it as in- 
evitable and the necessary; and then the moment 
comes when you perceive that it is what it is by 
virtue of your acquiescence. It sometimes happens 
to enter a room which in the half-light of drawn 
curtains looks comfortable and rather attractive; 
and then the windows are cleared, and the keen 
light of mid-day sweeps in, and we see the room 
for What it really is — tawdry and pretentious. 
And sometimes the Life which is Light falls into 
our lives, letting its revealing rays play upon the 
tawdry furniture of our soul. It is a cruel light 
that falls on the pretentious screens of our com- 
promises and shows them for the worthless articles 
they are; that shows the dust of prejudice which 
we have tried to think was deep conviction ; that 
shows what we have conceived to be our virtues, 
to be indifferent copies of the social conventions 
of the society of which we form a part. In such 
moments of self-recognition as that we have the 
chance, at any rate, of getting near the truth 



I AM THE LIFE 99 

about ourselves, if we can endure to stand in the 
cruel sunlight and let the truth sink deep. It is the 
moment when the possibility of a renovation of 
life suggests itself, a moment of keen striving of 
our human spirit with the Spirit of Christ. The 
impulse to take one's self in hand, and clear out all 
these shams and pretenses and compromises, to 
put an end once and for all to our excuses for 
neglect of service, when our alleged inability 
turns out to be but disguised sloth; to get the 
alternative, Jehovah or Baal, God or Mammon, 
Christ or self, explicit, becomes strong. And 
then the immense work of the change overwhelms 
us, and we draw back the curtain and reduce the 
light till the house of our life seems decently 
habitable. You have watched a horse attempting 
to free a wagon that has got in the mud and have 
seen the strain of the muscles in the tough pull 
that should loose the load ; and there was a second 
when there was a beginning of movement and 
success was on the point of attainment. But just 
then the muscles relaxed and it was all to begin 
again. We see our problems, and we seem on the 
very point of success, and then the spiritual mus- 
cles decline to act and we fall back. No; it is not 
that we have not our moments of clear seeing; 
it is not that the Life of God does not shine into 
the dark corners of our lives, it is not that the 



IOO THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

vision fails or the voice is silent; it is that some- 
thing intervenes and distracts the attention and 
possesses the affections and divides the will; and 
we drop the attempt in disheartenment. The 
something that comes between our dawning 
spiritual vision of our lives, the conviction that 
our religion requires that they be treated as the 
expression of a Divine Life which inhabits us, 
and our energetic actions in response to cur 
vision, is some phase of what we broadly call the 
world — the complex and sum of all that is opposed 
to God. The Trouble with the world is that it 
withdraws attention from the proper concerns of 
our life and consumes the energy which, if prop- 
erly directed, would have sufficed for their saneti- 
rkation. A worldly life is a very horrible thing to 
contemplate. It is a life that is hid, not with 
Christ in God, but in material things and interests. 
We may define a worldly life as one centered 
about unspiritual interests; or, perhaps better, as 
a life all of whose interests are treated as un- 
spiritual. A mode of activity to which we con- 
form ourselves; that is, whose unspiritual ideals 
we adopt, rather than a mode of activity which 
we transform by imposing oar own spiritual ac- 
tivities upon it. We fall into a way of classing 
life as worldly or unworldly according to its con- 
tents, its specific acts; whereas worldliness is not 



I AM THE LIFE IOI 

this or that set of acts but an attitude of mind 
towards action. It is a mistake to say that the 
theatre is worldly and a prayer-meeting unworldly. 
In the individual experience the reverse may quite 
easily be the case. It is absurd to suppose that 
riches lead to worldliness, and poverty is always 
free from it. The moving picture show is prob- 
ably patronized by as many worldly people as 
the opera. It matters little what the contents of 
life are; it is our total attitude toward life that 
matters. There is a perfectly worldly way of be- 
ing a Christian, as you may find by attempting to 
speak of spiritual truth to the first dozen Chris- 
tian people whom you meet. Life presents itself 
as raw material which may be moulded to suit 
any set of ideals that we possess. The insistent 
question is whether we are letting the ideals of 
the glaring material civilization in which we to- 
day live, impress themselves on us, or whether 
we have the spiritual vitality to maintain the 
ideals of the City of God in the midst of the city 
of this world. Are we carrying out of the Church 
the ideals which are presented to us in every line 
of the liturgy — the ideals of humility, of sacrifice, 
of purity, of charity — and expressing them through 
the acts of our daily life; or are we bringing the 
ideals of the world into the Church, and remaining 
even at the foot of the altar, frivolous pleasure 



102 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

seekers, slaves of our senses, trifling gossip-mon- 
gers, and uncharitable judges? A French writer 
has said, sweepingly, "there are only a few hun- 
dred Christians in the world." We may, no doubt, 
multiply the number somewhat; but it remains 
that the impression that the average Christian 
makes on the world is not that of one who has 
detached himself from the world and whose in- 
terests are plainly elsewhere — is not that of one 
who is the bearer of a divine message and the 
manifestor of a divine life. 

For into whatever circle of life our duties and 
obligations carry us, it will there become manifest 
whose we are and whom we serve. There is 
small need or use for the hidden Christian who 
regards his religion as his own private concern 
which is no business of his neighbor. "I dont," 
he says, ''wear my religion on my sleeve, or talk 
about it in offices and at dinner tables." But the 
Christian religion is not an esoteric religion; and 
whether a man talks of it or not, it will be audible 
and visible in the man if he actually exists. "A 
city set on a hill cannot be hid." An invisible 
religion is a non-existent religion. It might, to 
be sure, be hid if it were a special set of observ- 
ances, a ritual gone through at stated intervals, 
a few select rules of conduct. But it is not that; 
it is the expression of an indwelling Life. The 



I AM THE LIFE 103 

vital question is whether the life of the Incarnate 
is being suppressed or expressed by us. We are 
the organs of Christ's self-manifestation, the med- 
ium through which he makes himself known. 
What greater absurdity can we be guilty of 
than that of substituting for the New Testament 
conception of a Christian as the regenerate child 
of God, the new Creation, the member of Christ, 
in whom Christ Jesus is being formed — the moral 
man whose life is governed by a few select maxims 
of good conduct? Whatever else may be said 
of them they live in different worlds. 

I suppose none of us finds his own expression of 
religion other than disappointing. It is disappoint- 
ing to get up some hours before daylight and climb 
the rough way that leads to the mountain top to 
see the sunrise, only to find, when the hour strikes, 
that it rises behind mists and we do not see it at 
all. But perhaps if we would be patient the mists 
will begin to thin and their greyness be sho* through 
with opal lights — rose and pearl and mauve — till 
they at last melt away and unclose the valley o'er 
which the sun now pours a flood of golden light. 
And surely if we will be patient of the climbing 
and the waiting the mists will break in our lives 
and unclose the vision of God. Only the waiting 
must be an active waiting. There are so many 
things in us which are obstructive of our Lord's 



104 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

manifestation, so many things the obstructive 
powers of which we do not even perceive till we 
have set ourselves with much earnestness to follow 
the Way. Those surface things which we thought 
of as obstacles in the way of our spiritual de- 
velopment, the occupation which absorbs our time, 
and the associations that we felt we could not 
break with, are easily dealt with when once we 
are in earnest. They look formidable to the timid 
imagination standing at the parting of the ways 
and wondering whether it has any power to change 
its habits. But these turn out to be trifling things 
when once we start. The real difficulties of the 
way develop as we go on. There is one in particu- 
lar that I would note. Nietzsche tells of a traveler 
who had passed his life in observing men and 
cities, and who was asked if he had noted any one 
trait which was common to all the peoples whom he 
had seen. And the traveler replied, "I have no- 
ticed everywhere a certain tendency to sloth." That 
there is in us "a certain tendency to sloth" is the 
root difficulty we have to deal with. If, after St. 
Paul's analysis of the case, a man sees the better 
and follows the worse, I doubt very much whether 
it is the worse that is more attractive ; it is usually 
just that it is easier. It is the compulsion that we 
have constantly to put upon ourselves to keep our- 
selves up to any high standing that renders spirit- 



I AM THE LIFE 1 05 

ual activity so difficult ; and in the majority of cases 
so impossible. And the true significance of spirit- 
ual sloth and its immense obstructive power is not 
unmasked till we take up with some earnestness 
the practice of the spiritual life. When we try to 
bring to bear on the common-place contents of our 
lives the pressure of spiritual motives that shall 
lift them out of their common-placeness and trans- 
form them into acts of service and adoration, then 
we begin to understand the obstructive power of 
sloth. 

Our power to overcome this tendency to sloth 
by the steady, unflagging pressure of spiritual mo- 
tive, will be the evidence of the operation of the 
Life in our lives. If I understand the matter, it 
is most often through a certain sense of pressure 
that the presence of the Life within our lives is 
discerned. It is as though something within us 
were struggling for release, seeking to be born. 
The results that we are getting do not satisfy, and 
the inertia of habit struggles with the pressure of 
ideals, till one or the other conquers. It is the 
struggle of the butterfly within the chrysalis, though 
in the spiritual experience of men the butterfly 
often fails to break its way out. The inertia of life 
is a tremendous thing ; how often do we see it pre- 
vail against the dawning aspirations of a soul al- 



Io6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

most converted. The dead soul is an abortive at- 
tempt of the divine life to find expression. 

Let it, however, find the powers of the spiritual 
nature energetic and responsive, and that takes 
place which in the Apostles' phrase is Christ being 
formed in us. We experience his meaning. "That 
old things are passing away and all things are be- 
coming new." We emerge, like the butterfly, into 
a new world, passing out from a world of associa- 
tion with "the hidden things of darkness" into the 
light of the redeemed and sanctified life. You walk 
through the meadow on a day when thick clouds 
have hidden the sun, and each item of the land- 
scape is plain to you; you rejoice in the beauty of 
the little blue grass flower, in the shyness of the 
violets that hide beneath the leaves, in the grace 
of the willow that dips its slender fingers in the 
brook. And then the clouds break and the sun 
streams over the earth in a sudden explosion of 
golden light — and it is a new world. Every point 
of it is filled with light; it glows and burns and 
sparkles till you wonder why you thought it beauti- 
ful before. The coming of the Living Christ into 
the world of our consciousness is like that; he 
comes with a burst of splendor and transfigures it. 
The values of life are enhanced and transformed. 
You wonder what you found in life that was at- 
tractive when it lay in the darkness of his absence. 



I AM THE LIFE 107 

"And we beheld his glory," so the Apostle sums 
his experience, thinking of the days of his intimacy 
with one who was the Word made flesh. Glory 
seems to him the word that best gathered into one 
all the manifestations of the life that had taber- 
nacled in humanity, and which the darkness of hu- 
manity could not overcome. The mighty works and 
the signs, the words which were so different from 
the teaching of the scribes, and were not as man 
spake, and threw illuminating flashes into the mean- 
ing of God and man, the deeds of tenderness and 
pity — all these mingled in the "glory" that he saw. 
And this glory is not withdrawn from earth when 
the Christ himself passes away into invisibility, hid- 
den by "clouds." It is a glory that he has left 
with those whom he has redeemed and regenerated, 
to whom he gave power to become the Sons of God, 
and whom he made partakers of his own Life. The 
Ascended Jesus is not hidden, but is visible in the 
lives of those who are made one in his Life. 
Through and in them the Light of Jesus becomes 
visible in all its fascinating beauty and irresistible 
power. He is seen to-day in his Holy Ones. We 
who are his children, his redeemed ones, his new 
creation, are the recipients of his life and the mani- 
festors of his glory. That is our high and splendid 
vocation to which we respond by the joyous offer- 
ing of our lives. We are called up into the moun- 



Io8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

tains with him that when we come down our faces 
may shine with his transfiguring glory, that men 
seeing us penetrated by the Light which is Life 
might have no doubt of the present power of the 
Incarnate, and might glorify our Father who is 
in Heaven. 






I AM THE LIVING BREAD. 

Let us listen to the zvords of our Lord — 
I am the Living Bread. 

Let us picture — 

H FIRST Communion ; if you will, as it takes 
place here at St. Mary's, on a Whitsunday 
morning. It is a gray morning out there in 
the streets as the boys and girls are coming from 
their homes, but in here there is light and color. 
The red of the Altar hangings is repeated in the 
priest's vestments, the server's cassock, the flowers 
on the Altar, and is accented against the soft gray 
of the pillars and walls. Down in the nave are 
the newly confirmed, some dozens of eager faces, 
most of them very young. It recalls, does it not, 
a day in your own experience, when you knelt 
here or elsewhere, to receive for the first time the 
109 



IIO THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Body and Blood of your Lord. As we look at these 
young Christians, there is not, perhaps, as much 
recollection as we could wish; but it is a strange, 
unusual thing that they are engaged in, so we 
must allow for tense and excited nerves. But there 
is eagerness and expectancy, and, in the end, awe. 
They come to kneel at the rail with a pathetic 
desire to do what is customary, to remember their 
instructions ; and as the priest comes to them, there 
are hands stretched out that tremble a little, there 
are awe-stricken faces, there are eyes in which he 
catches the flash of tears. These souls that only 
yesterday experienced the grace of pardon are 
opened wistfully to our Lord with the expectancy 
of some mystericus blessing. These are pure 
abodes where the Lord that was Crucified and is 
Risen enters in to dwell, if he may, forever. Think 
of yourself, once more, as you knelt at your first 
Communion. 

Consider, first — 

That the Holy Communion is the means which 
our Lord has chosen to perpetuate his vital union 
with human souls. "He that eateth my Flesh and 
drinketh my Blood, dwelleth in me and I in him. 
"As the Living Father hath sent me, and I live by 
the Father : so he that eateth me, even he shall live 
by me." The insistence of the Church upon fre- 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD III 

quency of Communion is based on this — that 
through participation in the virtue of this Sacra- 
ment "our sinful bodies are made clean by his 
Body, and our souls washed through his most prec- 
ious Blood, and we may evermore dwell in him and 
he in us." We have some difficulty in appropriat- 
ing these plain statements as the exact meaning of 
our Communion. There are moments when we 
seem to find their truth ; and then our sense of their 
reality tends to diminish as we pass into moods 
that seem unspiritual. But consider, that it is pre- 
cisely in such moods that we most need to fix our 
minds on the nature of the act of Communion. We 
must beware of letting ourselves down to the level 
of our inferior moods; or, indeed, of letting our- 
selves be influenced at all, by moods, in our re- 
lation to our Blessed Lord. If our best moments, 
our moments of keenest perception of our Lord's 
presence, are rare, we can at any rate live in the 
light and inspiration of those moments. The mem- 
ory of them can be brought into the more frequent 
dull and unspiritual moments as stimulus to our 
tired faculties, as impulse to the will, as warmth 
to the emotions, rousing them to go out to meet 
the coming Guest of the soul with longing. That 
soul has gained much which has learned to insist 
that those passing moments that it has come to 



112 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

recognize as its best, shall tend to become habitual 
through persistency of spiritual effort. 

Consider, second — 

What it means to the soul to be filled constantly 
with the Personal Presence of its Savior, to have 
only to open its doors for him to come in. If we 
were more confident in our belief in the Real Pres- 
ence, should we not find a growing response to 
our Lord's coming? One needs so the active wel- 
coming of him. One feels that it is not the fear of 
sinning that is going to protect us and make 
us strong against temptation, but a sense of the 
loving and friendly presence of our Lord with us. 
There is a certain intimacy with him that grows out 
of frequent communion that makes us eager to be 
like him, which makes us long for the growth in 
us of his purity and holiness. Our habitual atti- 
tude toward our Lord has too much the quality of 
aloofness and distant admiration. It is just that 
attitude that his Incarnation was intended to 
break down, to substitute for it the attitude of inti- 
mate association. Our relation to our Lord is even 
closer than that of his Disciples in that it is an 
inner relation, a purely spiritual nearness, an inter- 
communion of spirit with spirit, which could only 
have place after his Ascension. We need to make 
our communion more explicitly a personal approach 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 1 1 3 

to one whom we love and go forth to meet. When 
I come to my communion, I am coming to present 
myself to my Lord as one whom he has chosen out 
of all the world to bear his name and to be his 
friend. If I trusted to myself, I might hesitate to 
come; but 1 come trusting in his promises; I come 
because he bids me come; I come believing that he 
wants me. Why should I distrust him and draw 
back from his offered love? 

Let us pray, then — 

For more of confidence in our approach to our 
Lord; for a securer grasp upon his promises, a 
more perfect trust in his word : "He that cometh to 
me I will in no wise cast out." 

We give Thee thanks, O Lord our God, after 
having received Thy holy, spotless, immortal, and 
heavenly Mysteries, which Thou hast given us for 
the benefit, sanctification, and healing of our souls 
and bodies. And we pray and beseech Thee, O 
good Lord, the Lover of men, to grant that the 
Communion of the holy Body and precious Blood 
of Thine Only-begotten Son may procure for us 
faith that needeth not to be ashamed, love without 
dissimulation, fulness of wisdom, healing of soul 
and body, repulse of every enemy, fulfilment of 
Thy commandments, an acceptable defence before 
the awful judgment-seat of Thy Christ. 



(9) 



114 THE SELF-REVELATION CF OUR LORD 

One likes to think of the first Eucharist of the 
Apostles, after the coming of the Holy Spirit had 
endued them with power from on high and distri- 
buted to them the gifts of ministry, which he who 
had on Ascension Day led his "Troop of Captives" 
to the court of heaven had received for men. We 
think of it as being most likely on the morrow of 
that first day of the Holy Spirit. It would be in 
that Upper Room where they had eaten their Last 
Passover, and had shared in the institution of the 
Blessed Sacrament which was to be the center and 
object of Christian worship "till he come." Dur- 
ing the days lately past they had gathered there in 
''fear of the Jews." Now they gather in joy and 
gladness in the strength of the Risen Life and in 
the power of the Indwelling spirit. St. John, 
I like to think, would be the celebrant, and they 
would renew the acts of the Institution, and receive 
with the elements a renewed sense of the Master's 
presence. How vivid would be their certainty that 
he was restored to them, that his words were ful- 
filled, "I will not leave you comfortless, I will come 
to you," as the words were pronounced "take, eat, 
this is my Body; drink ye all of this, this is my 
Blood." Jesus was in very deed with them, not 
through the influence of a memory, but in the fact 
cf his Personal Presence. There was no room for 
any doubt of his continued existence for he was 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 115 

known to them, and ever would be, in the breaking 
of the Bread. 

When we try to estimate the influences which 
bore upon the life of the Apostles and moulded 
their experience and guided their actions in those 
critical days that immediately followed the Ascen- 
sion of our Lord, that shaped their thought as to 
the meaning of his Resurrection and Ascension and 
his living Presence in heaven, it is hardly possible 
to over-estimate the influence exercised by the re- 
stored Presence of our Lord that was affected as 
a part of their daily experience by the celebration 
of the Holy Eucharist. Under the strain of the 
constantly recurring criticism of their experience, 
the effort to see clearly what it indeed meant, the 
fact that more than any would clear their thought 
was precisely the daily renewed experience that 
Jesus is here which was the result of their com- 
munions. "He that eateth me, even he shall live 
by me," was so true just then. There were so 
many mysterious words of our Lord that became 
clear in the light of the Real Presence — all those 
words about going away that he might come again ; 
those promises of an abiding presence with them 
till the end of the world. Here, before whatever' 
improvised altar they might set up, all would be 
plain. This Jesus whom they had seen go in the 
clouds of heaven, and whom they had expected to 



Xl6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

so come as he had gone, was come otherwise ; he is 
with them in the unseen Presence of the sacrament. 
And the restored Presence was not an ineffective 
or silent Presence: it was active and energetic, a 
Presence that was inspiration. During the years 
that they had passed with him he had guided them 
by the spoken word; now he is to guide them by 
inner inspiration; he will not speak to them but 
in them, and they will not be less but more, certain 
of his Voice. And as human beings will always 
need objective facts on which to lean, which are 
to them the pledges, the signs, the means of inner 
realities, they have been provided in the Holy Eu- 
charist with the pledge, the sign, the means of the 
Presence which morning by morning, entering into 
their souls, becomes known to them in the impulse 
that it imparts to their action, the strength that it 
gives to their wills, and the illumination that it 
sheds into their minds. They go forth from their 
communions ready to meet the opposition of the 
world, ready to stand before rulers and kings, able 
to speak with words of wisdom which they know 
are not of their cunning planning, but are sent as 
the Spirit gives, ready, when the call comes, to lay 
down their lives, ready to drink of the cup and be 
baptised with the baptism, strong in the conscious- 
ness which they have of being led by his Presence 
to the fulfilling of his will. 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 1 17 

There is little said about the Holy Eucharist in 
the New Testament; but what is said is quite suf- 
ficient to indicate the place that it held in the new 
life of the followers of Jesus. At the beginning of 
the Book of the Acts there are two passages which 
say all that needs to be said. The first passage is 
that which gives the notes, so to call them, of the 
new born Church : "And they continued steadfast 
in the Apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in the 
breaking of the bread and of the prayers." "The 
breaking of the Bread" is thus one of the salient 
notes of the community from the outset, and its 
place is emphasized by this other passage from the 
Acts: "They continued daily with one accord in 
the Temple, and breaking bread at home;" that is, 
in the Upper Room, no doubt, which formed their 
first "church." Here, while they still delayed to 
break entirely with their ancestral religion, and 
perhaps thought it might not be needful to do so, 
and therefore continued their attendance on the 
Temple services, they met for that act of worship 
which was distinctively Christian. Here the Holy 
Eucharist was their daily act of worship and the 
bond of their unity with one another and with their 
risen Lord. 

In a sense, the Eucharistic doctrine of the New 
Testament was very simple ; that is, it is expressed 
in few words and has not reached the elaboration 



Il8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of statement which later was compelled by the de- 
velopment of thought. Of course it is impossible 
to keep any subject that is of vital interest to men 
in the simplicity of its first statements. It is one 
of the common phenomena of the history of 
thought that those who are the most strenuous ad- 
vocates of freedom of thought are most averse to 
the complexities of statement which are the neces- 
sary outcome of that freedom. We cannot very 
well go through the world keeping statements with- 
out asking the meaning of them, and when we ask 
their meaning we are on the road to a developed 
theory. We have left simplicity behind it seems. 
But what we have really done is to analyze our 
seemingly simple statements that we may under- 
stand them better. In the beginning the Church 
was content with the unanalyzed statement that 
Jesus is God; in the event, it took centuries to de- 
termine what is implied in those words. In the 
beginning the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist was 
received in the same unanalyzed way, and is capa- 
ble of statement in the words: "Jesus is here." 
The doctrine which St. Paul "received" is almost 
as simple : "the bread which we break, is it not the 
communion of the Body of Christ, the cup which we 
drink, is it not the communion of the Blood of 
Christ?" It remained for later times to introduce 
complexity. Complexity belongs to the time of 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 119 

analysis and controversy, but perhaps for us who 
believe the brief statement of the Apostle is best. 

For what we mean by the Real Presence is that 
Christ, as he promised, comes — Jesus is here. To 
apprehend and act on that truth there is small need 
of speculation; there is need of spiritual apprehen- 
sion. "I am the Living Bread that came down from 
heaven," he says. Jesus is here, on the altar, in 
the tabernacle. He is here utterly, — perfect God 
and perfect man. What we need is to believe him, 
to receive him, to worship him. "I am the Living 
Bread, whoso eateth my Flesh and drinketh my 
Blood, I will raise him up at the last day.'' Yes; 
we believe, we eat, we live, we shall rise. 

It is very difficult, people say, to believe that 
quite literally. Ah! it is just that sense of diffi- 
culty which has led to the elaborate analysis which 
is objected to as being theology rather than relig- 
ion. But how should we expect that such a fact 
would be other than difficult? Any fact of the 
material world, facts as simple of statement as 
that water wets, or fire burns run out into insolu- 
able mysteries if you push the analysis far enough ; 
they only seem simple. What we mean by sim- 
plicity is not at all that they are simple, but that they 
are familiar ; so familiar that we never think to ask 
what they mean. How then should not facts which 
deal, not with chemical processes, the relations of 



I20 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

molecules, of electrons, which get back ultimately 
to the constitution of matter, where we lose our- 
selves in a maze of speculation, but with the rela- 
tions of spirit, with the relations of the soul to its 
Maker, with the means that the Incarnate adopts to> 
enter into relation with his members, not be mys- 
terious and difficult? They cannot be apprehended 
by the senses but only by the grasp of faith. 
"Jesus is here" is a proposition addressed directly 
to our faith; and is easily appropriated by those 
who have the gift of faith. It is incapable of any 
form of statement which shall be without difficulty 
for the intellect. 

It is no doubt true that much of the feeling of 
difficulty which ordinary folk feel in regard to re- 
ligious facts or doctrines is, not a difficulty of the 
intellect at all, but of the imagination. It is due 
primarily to unfamiliarity with the facts. Most of 
the strange facts of life we have become so familiar 
with that they never strike us as strange, they never 
set the imagination to work on them. They are 
facts that we assume that we understand because 
they never create any surprise. I have sometimes 
thought that the difficulty that many feel in regard 
to the Real Presence is in some measure due to 
their isolation of the fact — their assumption that 
it is the only fact of the same order that is present- 
ed to them. If they could see it related to other 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 121 

like facts much of the feeling of difficulty would 
pass. Let us see if we can so relate it. 

I take it that no one who is likely to read these 
pages will have experienced anything of the feel- 
ing of difficulty of the kind of which we have been 
speaking when they think of the Presence of Cod. 
God is one and omnipresent, we are told ; and that 
statement is capable of being expressed in this 
form : God is here. By which, of course, we menn, 
not that God exerts power here, but that God is 
here, is personally present in this room in which I 
am writing or in that room in which you are read- 
ing. That is a very wonderful, a very mysterious 
fact; but it does not create in you the reaction, "I 
do not see how that can be, I find it hard to believe 
that." To be sure, you do not see how it can be; 
but you long ago appropriated it by faith and hold 
it without any emotional revolt. You believe sim- 
ply, God is here. So it is likewise a part of your 
faith that the God who is one and omnipresent, 
"Came down from heaven," and "was incarnate" in 
Christ Jesus. You read his human life in the Gos- 
pels, you follow the story of his ministry, his death, 
his Resurrection and Ascension. When you sum 
up your belief about this wondrous life you find 
that the simplest form in which you can express 
your belief is this — Jesus is God. That again is a 
fact that you have appropriated by faith and it has 



122 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

become part and parcel of your Christian profession. 
You do not see how it can be, but the statement 
produces in you no feeling of difficulty. Once 
again: you are accustomed to receive the sacra- 
ments and you experience that there is a reaction 
of them upon your spiritual nature; that through 
them you are brought into a special relation to 
God, and that God acts through them upon your 
soul. You call this action grace: and when you 
try to state the doctrine of grace in its simplest 
terms you say, Grace is God. Grace is not a force 
acting on you from without, from a distance; but 
is the presence of God in your soul. Once more, 
you do not see how that can be; but you know 
that it is because you have experienced it. The 
statement that it is true produces no feeling of an 
insuperable difficulty to accepting it. 

Now all those facts, God is here, Jesus is God, 
Grace is God, are facts of the same order, what we 
are wont to call supernatural facts, or, as we might 
call them, facts of the spiritual order. What I 
want you to see is that the Presence of the Incar- 
nate God in the Sacrament of the Altar, what we 
call the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eu- 
charist, is also a fact of the same order. It is no 
more wonderful or difficult than those other facts 
and ought not to produce any other sort of reac- 
tion when we think of it. 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 1 23 

But perhaps there is another element that enters 
into our sense of the difficulty of the Real Presence. 
One sometimes finds in talking with people in re- 
gard to the Blessed Sacrament that they have con- 
fused the symbolic acts which are performed at the 
celebration of the Eucharist with the mode of the 
Real Presence itself. The celebration of the Eu- 
charist is not only the administration of a sacra- 
ment, it is the offering of a sacrifice. The Lord's 
death is shown, the one sacrifice forever is present- 
ed before the Father. In the process of offering 
the sacrifice the death of our Lord is symbolically 
set forth, and the Body broken and the Blood shed 
are represented by the bread and wine. But when 
we connect that sacrifice and the sacrament of the 
Holy Communion and speak of the presence of our 
Lord's humanity, it is not at all meant that our 
Lord's Body is by itself present under the form of 
bread, or that his Blood by itself present under the 
form of wine. A misunderstanding that this is 
what is intended, and that we are expected to think 
of our Lord's Body and Blood as separated in the 
sacrament is a frequent source of difficulty and 
confusion. But the sacramental symbolism does 
not imply any real division in our Lord — that is 
impossible. Our Lord is present in the sacrament 
as Incarnate God — God and man, one Christ. And 
what we receive in the sacrament is not his Body, 



124 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

in separation, under the element of bread, and his 
Blood, in separation, under the element of wine, 
but we receive him, God and man, wonderfully con- 
descending to unite himself with our spiritual na- 
ture that "we may dwell in him and he in us." The 
account of the sacrament may be simplified to this : 
Jesus is here, and is come to dwell in our souls, 
mysteriously entering into union with them. When 
we thus think of the Eucharist, as the Catholic 
Church has always thought of it, all alleged ma- 
terialism of the Real Presence is seen to be swept 
away. 

This presence of our Lord in the Holy Eucharist 
is rightly spoken of as a spiritual presence; that is, 
a presence which is after the laws of that spiritual 
mode of existence which our Lord entered upon at 
the Resurrection and Ascension and not after 
the laws of the material world. He is 
present in a divine and heavenly manner, and 
not in a manner that can be cognized by the senses. 
The senses touch matter not spirit. It is the pres- 
ence of the Risen and Ascended Jesus. What we 
need to apprehend that presence is not profound 
learning, but intense faith. No learning, no at- 
tempts to analyze or define the mode of the pres- 
ence, are likely to help us much: they are much 
more likely to confuse Us by importing into a pure- 
ly spiritual transaction terms which belong to 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 1*5 

science and philosophy. What we need is not the 
learning of the theologian or philosopher, but the 
simplicity of the child. The child does not impose 
the categories of matter and time and place upon 
a spiritual act, and our difficulties arise from the 
fact that we will not refrain from so doing. The 
child is able to accept the truth "J esus is here" 
without raising the question of the relation of his 
presence to the earthly elements that symbolize and 
convey it. A father and mother took their little 
boy on a Sunday morning to the celebration of the 
Holy Eucharist. It was the child's first experience 
of Catholic worship, and the parents had done what 
they could to prepare him by telling him the mean- 
ing of what he would see. He had the child's 
eager interest in the new sights and sounds and 
actions; but when the sermon came he fell asleep 
and was permitted to sleep on as the service pro- 
ceeded. It was well on toward the end when he 
awoke, and, after a moment of recollection, he 
leaned to his mother and whispered, "Has he 
come?" If we could but attain that simplicity! 
There is all the eucharistic doctrine that we want. 
We go to our communions with the conviction that 
he who is the Living Bread, the Food of our Souls, 
is coming; and after devout participation in the 
mysteries we go away with the certainty that he 
has come — go away knowing that he is the guest 



1*6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of our souls, the spiritual meat and drink that 
nourishes them unto Eternal Life. 

Let us see to it, then, that when we dwell on the 
thought of our Lord's presence, we are seeking as 
aids to our apprehension of it, not the skill and 
training of the critic, but the insight of the mystic. 
We may say that the mystic is one who trusts his 
spiritual faculties to interpret to him the truths of 
the Spirit. He is one who has direct apprehension 
of the spiritual world. And this direct apprehension 
is not, or ought not to be, the possession of rare 
souls. The Christian religion is a mystic religion 
and it is possible for all Christians to approach its 
truths by the way of mystic apprehension. To do 
so, no doubt, requires a certain orientation on the 
part of the believer. He must have divorced him- 
self from the materialism and intellectualism which 
is characteristic of much approach to religious 
truths and practice, and have accustomed himself 
to test the acts in which his faith expresses itself 
by the results that he spiritually discerns. Does he 
find as the result of them that he is conscious of 
the presence of God? Does he know that the God 
he is appealing to in his intercessions, to whom he 
is offering himself in his acts of self-oblation, to 
whom he is uniting himself in his acts of love, is- 
actively participant to all these actions? I do not 
mean, does he have visions or fall into ecstacy, but 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 1 27 

simply, is he conscious, does he know, that God is 
here and acting? The consciousness may not be 
vivid — if it is only a vague consciousness one can 
still be certain of it. I fancy that many of us do 
not have this consciousness because we are not ex- 
pecting it, make no room for it, are so concerned 
with our own action that we are inattentive to the 
action of God. But the things of the Spirit are, 
and are only, spiritually discerned. The attentive 
spirit discerns many things which are missed by the 
unexpectant spirit. It is with expectant spirits 
that we must approach our Lord in the Eucharist, 
discerning the Lord's body, not only distinguishing 
between it and common things, but discerning its 
reality in the sense of communion with him which 
our participation brings. 

The exclusive reliance upon the intellect as the 
sole interpretative factor of our nature is disastrous 
in the matter of religion. We arrive at the cer- 
tainty of faith far sooner when we trust ourselves 
to the light and leading of our spiritual powers which 
have been disciplined and strengthened by constant 
use. We do not feel that St. John or St. Paul ar- 
rived at their knowledge of God by scientific or 
philosophical methods. They have seen. What 
they have to tell us of the meaning of our Lord 
and of his work for us is the outcome of their per- 
sonal experience of him. As I have pointed out, 



128 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

they know him, not as one knows an historical 
character whose life they have studied, or whom 
they have, perhaps personally known; but they 
have an immediate knowledge of him which is the 
result, not altogether of vision, but of the silent in- 
tercourse of many years of prayer and meditation 
and communion. They know him because they 
are one with him with a unity which involves his 
constant action as well as theirs. 

Our spiritual experience is much less than theirs 
no doubt, but it is of the same order — we see and 
know. With us, at any rate, it is a fluctuating ex- 
perience, it is to us like the rise and fall of tides. 
There are moments of intense apprehension when 
the tides of spiritual certainty sweep up the shore 
and flood all our life. We experience then the ex- 
hilaration of immediate knowledge: all doubt is 
washed away. At such moments we feel that we 
can meet all that life brings us in a glad spirit be- 
cause we are so certain of God. Such moments 
tend to connect themselves, do they not, with our 
communions? We remember mornings when it 
was indeed the Bread of Life that we received — re- 
ceived with souls that were responsive to the Di- 
vine Presence, and overflowed with the joy of pos- 
session. We remember whole days wherein our 
Lord abode in us and we were comforted and con- 
soled by his presence, strengthened for the work 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 1 29 

of the day, or just filled with the glad sense of his 
nearness. But it is true also that there are mo- 
ments of ebb, when the tides of spiritual vitality 
recede and leave the rocks bare and the shores 
strewn with impotent desires and ineffective as- 
pirations. There are dreary and colorless mo- 
ments when we come away from our communions 
with no sense of quickened spirituality or stimulat- 
ed powers. There are long days in which the 
word of our Lord is rare : there is no open vision. 
These are days of discipline and waiting and of the 
hidden action of God. "There is a hiding of his 
power." But only a hiding, not a failure of it. 
Perhaps our spiritual apprehension has run low 
through our absorption "in the other things," which 
distract the life from God. Perhaps there has been 
real failure of faith in us. Perhaps it is one of the 
tests of his love. In any case we must not doubt 
but hold the faster to him. He is still with us. 

"When He appoints to meet thee, go thou forth — 

It matters not 
If South or North, 

Bleak waste or sunny plot. 
Nor think, if haply He thou seek'st be late, 

He does thee wrong. 
To stile or gate 

Lean thou thy head, and long! 
It may be that to spy thee He is mounting 

Upon a tower, 

(10) 



130 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Or in thy counting 

Thou hast mistaken the hour. 
But, if He come not, neither do thou go 

Till Vesper chime, 
Belike thou then shalt know 

He has been with thee all the time." 

This expression of the divine presence, this di- 
rect apprehension by faith of spiritual reality, 
comes almost naturally to some souls. They have 
never been disturbed by doubt or sin, and have liv- 
ed from childhood in communion with their Sav- 
iour. But in most of us — we purchase this liberty 
at a great price : the price of penitential tears and 
times of indifference and neglect redeemed by hard 
work. Our spiritual certainty comes to us after 
many hours of submissive prayer have cleared the 
spiritual vision, after much meditation has cleansed 
our inner faculties and devout communions have 
strengthened them — long hours in which we have 
patiently waited for the Divine Advent. One of 
our constant dangers is that we lose our effort 
through its vagueness. How much of what we 
think to be spiritual effort, is only vague aspiration, 
a drifting on the tides of the imagination rather 
than a resolute pulling against the stream of inflow- 
ing discursive thought. It is easy to let one's-self 
wander through the meadows of the Gospel, admir- 
ing the flowers, but without plucking any bloom or 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 13I 

fruit for our own immediate need. And this seems 
to be a special cause of failure in many commun- 
ions. We so often come to our Lord with inchoate 
aspirations rather than as resolute knockers at the 
gate, who know quite well why they want to enter. 
"Seek and ye shall find"; but only those find who 
are quite clear as to what they are seeking. So 
many communions are fruitless because we did 
not come looking for any fruit. So many knock 
timidly at the door who could not tell what they 
want if it should, perchance, be opened. We must 
come with whatever lame and halt we have with an 
express request that they may be healed. Our 
Lord's bounty no doubt, outruns our desires; but 
the Pearl Merchant was at least seeking goodly 
pearls when he found that whose surpassing beauty 
caused him to sell all that he had to acquire it. 

The Holy Eucharist is the means of our Lord's 
self-revelation. Through it he makes himself 
known to us. It is not easy for him to make him- 
self known; it is sometimes impossible. He found 
in the days of his flesh that there were places where 
it was hopeless for him to attempt to speak of the 
truths he had brought to men, where no mighty 
works were possible. There are souls now in 
which he cannot work. He works best in an at- 
mosphere of love. The Saints have such perfect 
vision of our Lord because their love is so perfect^ 



l 3 2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LOR© • 

without any withholding. Love is the great re~ 
vealer. We feel that those marvelous pages of 
St. John are the fruitage of his great love. He, 
more than anyone else, can tell us of the inner life 
of his Master because his love saw deeper into 
that life. While the other evangelists tell us 
events, the external history of Jesus of Nazareth, 
Saint John tells us the spiritual meaning of the 
events. He lingers little over the outward happen- 
ings ; he is eager to take us with him into the sanc- 
tuary of our Lord's thought. You say, "more was 
revealed to him/' I say, "more could be revealed 
to him." Not only is much given by love, but 
much is given to it. ■ 

Therefore St. John's treatment of the Eucharist 
is vastly different from that of the other evangel- 
ists. They were content to record the act of the 
Institution. St. John sees in it a mode of our 
Lord's self-revelation. Hence that marvelous sixth 
chapter of his Gospel. He dwells lovingly there 
on the relations of the sacramental Christ to our 
whole nature — on the permanent union wrought by 
his reception, on the far-reaching effects of our 
"eating" of Christ. We are, as it were, trans- 
fused with his life. The Holy Communion is that 
fountain of living water springing up unto eternal 
life, which he speaks of elsewhere. The eternal, 
the resurrection, life is directly connected with it. 



I AM THE LIVING BREAD 1 33 

"I am the living bread which came dawn from 
heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live 
forever." "Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh 
my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up 
at the last day." Our Lord imparted to us, is the 
principle of eternal life. It is no transient union 
that is wrought by our sacramental incorporation 
in him. Because he lives in us, and as long as he 
lives in us, we live also. The eternal years are as 
nothing to us ; we have passed into the stability of 
God. 



"Not any power the universe can know, 

Can touch the spirit hid with Christ in God. 
For naught that he has made, above, below, 
Can part us from his love." 

The certainty of this stability of life "in him," of 
life that transcends mortality and takes hold upon 
eternity, which is the characteristic feature of St. 
John's interpretation of the Eucharist, I venture 
to think becomes the personal possession of the 
Christian in proportion to the passion of his love. 
Love, too, is a medium of revelation. It has its 
own methods, its ways to knowledge, its own cer- 
tainties. And what school of love is there 
that is comparable to the school of the Eu- 
charist? Here is the love that shrinks not from 
the humility of a hidden life, the love that makes 



131 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

itself obedient to us, coming to us when we call, 
putting itself at the disposal of our desire. Our 
Lord, in the loving offer of himself, has again, as 
in his life on earth, subjected himself to derision, 
to scorn, to insult, to denial and rejection. He has 
put himself in the power of men, made it possible 
for them "to crucify the Son of God afresh." 
There is no sadder chapter in the history of Chris- 
tianity than that which tells the story of the treat- 
ment of our Lord in the sacrament of his love. 

It lays an obligation on our love, does it not ? the 
obligation not only of vision that we may find him 
there for ourselves, and by our personal devotion 
offer ourselves to him ; but the obligation of repar- 
ation, that we at his sacrament may pray for the 
forgiveness of those who treat him lightly, and, 
in their ignorance, despise him. In the joy of our 
possession let us not forget them. 

For our joy in the presence of our Lord is the 
supreme joy of the Christian experience. Through 
the sacrament of the altar we know our Lord's 
presence in the soul, embraced and embracing. We 
know our possession in him of that Eternal Life 
from which no earthly power can separate us. 
We know the love of Christ which passeth know- 
ledge and are filled with all fullness of God. 



I AM THE DOOR. 
Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 

I Am the Door. ' 

Let us try to picture to ourselves — 

/^UR Lord inviting men to come to him and 
^\J find rest. How often the word "Come" is 
on his lips. It is the call to discipleship: 
"Come, take up the Cross, and follow me." It is 
the call to the weary: "Come unto me all ye that 
labor and are heavy-laden, and I will refresh you.'' 
It is the call to intimate experience of him : "Come 
and see." We seem to see him reading the char- 
acter of those whose lives he touches, seeking in 
their experience some point of contact through 
which he may offer himself with the best hope of 
being accepted. We watch him talking with the 
Woman of Samaria, leading her to see the meaning 
of her own life and to desire something better, if, 

135 



O THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

perchance, that will bring her to repentance. We 
watch his wonderful dealing with the Syro-Phoeni- 
cian woman, by his seeming repulse of her bring- 
ing her faith into activity. He seems to go deep 
into the inner life of the paralytic who lies on his 
bed helpless before him, when he says, first of all, 
"Thy sins be forgiven thee." He leads Philip on 
to more perfect knowledge when he says, "Have 
I been so long time with thee, and yet thou hast 
not known me, Philip. He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father." His teaching opens to men the 
treasures of spiritual knowledge so that after they 
have talked with him, it is as though a great light 
had shined into their lives and lit up the dark 
places there ; as though some door that had hither- 
to been closed to them were thrown open and they 
saw hid treasures. What has happened is that he 
has made them see their lives as they really are, 
stripped of the coverings in which they custom- 
arily swathe them. His words take men into their 
own souls, and they see themselves with his eyes. 

Consider, first — 

That it is in him that there comes to us Salva- 
tion; and that being saved, we go out in his 
strength to meet the experience that is life. We 
come to God in him, and then, abiding in him, we 
go back to life. This is at once our safety and our 



I AM THE DOOR 137 

strength, that we are in him. This is our confi- 
dence, that we have access to the Father through 
him. Our life depends upon him all the time, and 
that is its freedom. We do not lose, we acquire, 
freedom of thought and action in him, because in 
him we are freed from the ignorance and sin which 
are the ground of slavery. As I go in and out 
through him, nothing can harm my life, I am safe. 
All troubles and perplexities are external. They 
may hurt very much, but they cannot harm. Do 
we quite appreciate what a wonderful thing this 
security of the Christian is? That we are safe 
from any ultimate harm? The gray rocks rise out 
of the sea, and on the day of storm the sea beats 
itself to foam about them, and on the day of calm 
the sun blisters them, but they stand unchanged for 
centuries. Our inner lives are shaken by no 
storms if they are lived under the shadow of his 
wings, abiding in him we are undisturbed, and our 
souls go in and out through him and find pasture. 
When the wolf cometh, there is always a refuge 
through the Open Door. 

Consider, second — 

That our safety hangs on our readiness to ac- 
cept sanctuary in him. If we choose to meet the 
pains of life in our strength; if we choose to 
fight the world with its own weapons; then the 



138 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

conditions of our warfare have become carnal. 
And is it not true that we often let ourselve be 
lured from the security of the hills to fight in the 
plains upon equal terms with a stronger adversary ? 
If we accept the world's view of life and adopt its 
standards, and govern ourselves by its morality, we 
have abandoned the security that was ours because 
of our abiding in Christ. Acceptance of our Lord's 
invitation to come unto him involves coming away 
from all else. It means the frank adoption of the 
manner of living which is commended in the Ser- 
mon on the Mount. Coming to Christ is a per- 
manent elevation of the life, and a permanent aban- 
donment of the principles of non-Christian living. 
Consider whether you have really accepted our 
Lord's invitation to come. What evidence do you 
find of acceptance? "What crucifixion of self, what 
abandonment of houses and lands, of father and 
mother, what resolute putting of the hand to the 
plow with no backward look? Or with the semb- 
lance of acceptance, is the world still in your 
heart? Do you find it possible to go in and out 
only through him, the One Door ? To see the 
world and eternity alike through the medium of his 
teaching? No doubt, the pastures of the world are 
fat and succulent; but before we are filled, the 
Wolf cometh, and the Hireling fleeth, and we are 
at the mercy of the cruel teeth. The fall of a life 



I AM THE DOOR 1 39 

built on the sands of this world is fatal and final. 
The Door of the Sheepfold is always open. Have 
you gone in?, 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may abide in him and there find safety. 
Let us pray that we may so be in him that all our 
thoughts and desires may be approved by him, and 
that he may be ever our inspiration. 

O God, Who art the unsearchable abyss of 
peace, the ineffable sea of love, the fountain of 
blessings, and the bestower of affection, Who send- 
est peace to those who receive it; open to us this 
day the sea of Thy love, and water us with plen- 
teous streams from the riches of Thy grace, and 
from the most sweet springs of Thy benignity. 
Make us children of quietness and heirs of p?ace. 
Enkindle in us the fire of Thy love ; sow in us Thy 
fear ; strengthen our weakness by Thy power ; bind 
us closely to Thee and to each other in one firm 
and indissoluble bond of unity; through our Lord 
and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 



"I am the door," our Lord said, "by me if any 
man enter in he shall be saved, and shall go in and 
out and find pasture." Enter in, that is, to the 
sheep-fold, which is the place of Christ's rule, the 
place where are gathered all those who are in him. 



140 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

It is that state of salvation that we enter when we 
"put on" Christ. It is the same truth that we 
have heard our Lord elsewhere teaching, that in 
Him is the approach to the Father. "There is none 
other name under heaven given among men where- 
by we must be saved." 

Is it true that we are inclined to stop our thought 
at the point where it touches our union with our 
Lord and his mystical Body? I sometimes feel 
that that is a danger. It is so hard to take in all 
aspects of the truth that we let ourselves rest in a 
partial statement of it which therefore has the af- 
fect of an untruth. Our emphasis falls upon the 
fact that we are in Christ — "in Christ," thus in 
some degree obscuring the fact that Christ is the 
Door opening to, the Way leading to the Father. 
Our fellowship is with the Father through the In- 
carnate Son who is the one mediator between God 
and man. What I am trying to suggest is this- 
whether our personal religion is not sometimes de- 
fective through a lack of explicit realization of our 
relation to the Father; whether we are not, all un- 
consciously, no doubt, resting in the Mediator, 
rather than being brought by the action of the 
Mediator to an apprehension of our union with the 
Father. Our life of union is a life "in Christ," that 
is, we are united to his humanity; but to the end 
that through his humanity which is personally 



I AM THE DOOR 141 

united toliis divinity we in turn should attain union 
with the divine nature and find our ultimate rest 
in God. Indeed, we do not reach a final statement 
-of our fellowship, until it is stated as fellowship 
with the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three Per- 
sons in one God. Union is only completely real- 
ized as union with the Blessed Trinity in the splen- 
, dor of the Beatific Vision. 

This promised, we may go back to our Lord's 
self-presentation as the Door. It is through him 
that we have access to the Father. And as his 
life work issues in, and is consummated, by his 
death, it is upon that Atoning death that we center 
our attention. "When thou didst overcome the 
sharpness of death," we say, thou didst open the 
kingdom of heaven to all believers." 

The meaning of the Atonement is best under- 
stood by means of the symbol that our Lord used 
in this connection, that of the Good Shepherd. Or- 
dinarily we do not find statements of the doctrine 
of the Atonement very comprehensible. We lose 
ourselves in speculation as to how one can suffer 
for another, or how God can accept the sufferings 
of one who has not sinned as a substitute for any 
atoning action by those who are guilty. Such spec- 
ulation seems to carry us far away from the Gospel 
presentation of the relation of our Lord's activity 
to us. In our Lord's own symbol of his relation 



142 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

to us, and action for us, we get the needed note — 
the note that we will do well to hold to, the note of 
self-identification with man. The Good Shepherd 
does not stand apart from the flock in solitary suf- 
fering; he suffers through and because of his sdf- 
identification with them. His sufferings are not 
something which have "merit," and are applied to 
men externally, in a mechanical manner ; but some- 
thing that men are assumed to enter and have 
applied to them. 

Men go into God through him, the Door. They 
become one with him and, so sharing his life, his 
experience, it results that his sufferings become 
theirs. We must beware in religion of all external 
machinery, of all action of God conceived as out- 
ward and compulsory. The action of our Lord in 
the Incarnation and Atonement is only comprehen- 
sible, as saving action for the individual, as the in- 
dividual comes to participate in it. The Incarna- 
tion must be imparted to us by our being assumed 
into the Incarnate Body, and then because of that 
assumption we partake of the sufferings and share 
in the Atonement. The sufferings of Christ are 
extended to us by virtue of our incorporation in 
him. The sufferings of the Christian are not 
meaningless things, but are the extension to him 
of the experience of his Master. For the sheep go 
in through him; their entrance to God is through 



I AM THE DOOR 143 

participation in the -Christ-experience. They must 
recapitulate that : in them the Christ-experience re- 
peats itself. That is really what is meant by fol- 
lowing the example of Christ. The theory that has 
been so popular of late years, and of which, per- 
haps, Tolstoy is the best exponent, that the imita- 
tion of Christ means the imitation of his social con- 
duct, with some attempt at detailed copying of his 
poverty and self-denial, hardly touches the fringe 
of the imitation of Jesus. To be poor because 
Jesus was poor; to be kind because Jesus was kind ; 
seems to me a wholly misdirected way of going 
about a true imitation, because it is so completely 
external. The true imitation starts with the fact 
of our union with our Lord, in the sense that I have 
been describing, in order that being in him and he 
in us, his life may be reflected in us: that is, our 
sufferings may be his sufferings, our joys his joys, 
our works his works. As his experience was so 
all-embracingly human it may be repeated under 
the external setting of any human life. It is not 
true that in order to be a Christian, to live the 
Christ-life, one has to repeat the external setting 
of our Lord's human life, to reproduce the incidents 
of Nazareth and Galilee. One is by no necessity 
nearer our Lord on a shoe-makers bench than on a 
throne. One may abandon wealth to serve God, 
but one may also use wealth in the service of God. 



144 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

The annals of sanctity protest against the literalism 
of the Tolstoyan theory. St. Francis is no more a 
saint than St. Louis ; and neither the poverty of the 
one, nor the kingdom of the other, created his sanc- 
tity ; but the life of the Saviour which was in both 
alike. It is a wretched assumption that you can 
attain to conformity to Christ by some outer change 
in the manner of your life. If John Fox was a 
great Christian it was not by virtue of any eccen- 
tricity of dress or manner; if Tolstoy had peace 
with God it was not because he dressed and lived 
like a peasant; nor is the Christian character of 
an Andrewes or a Laud doubtful because they lived 
in the usual state of bishops of their times. The 
life of union is possible anywhere and shows itself 
in the abandonment of self, utter and unstinted, to 
the will of God, in the will to make all the facts of 
one's life the matter of sacrifice, the expression of 
the Spirit of Christ that dwells in us. 

This self-surrender to the will of Christ that one's 
life may express that will results in the Christian 
life as a life visibly dominated by the mind of 
Christ. They who have entered by the Door be- 
come filled with the Spirit and God-possessed. 
They also go out; that is, they henceforth live 
their lives in the world, in whatever station God 
may call them to, in the light and leading of the 
Spirit of Christ whom they serve and whose they 



I AM THE DOOR 145 

are. They manifest what they have become. They 
bear fruit abundantly — those Fruits of the Spirit 
which are the evidences of the Spirit's energetic 
presence. They "find pasture" in whatsoever 
place it is the will of God that they should be. 
There he provides for them, provides the food that 
shall sustain their life in him, provides the activity 
which abundantly occupies the energies of their 
lives. They do not conquer the world for Christ 
by despising it, but by rinding in it the opportunity 
of service. It is God's world, and therefore their 
world. With matchless sweep of vision the Apos- 
tle says: "all things are yours; whether Paul of 
Apollos or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, 
or things present, or things to come ; all are yours : 
and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's." 

The inner action of Christ must precede the 
outer action. "They go in and out." And the focus, 
so to say, of this inner action of Christ's Spirit is 
the conscience. I am afraid that there are many 
who think trivially of their conscience. It is not 
to them the voice of the indwelling Spirit, a source 
of continual guidance in which they can perceive 
the communication of the mind of Christ to them ; 
but a source of dissatisfaction and unrest. This 
appears in man's attempt, ever renewed, to substi- 
tute something external for the voice of the Spirit. 
No doubt it is true that our consciences need edu- 
(ii) 



146 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

cation and training; but it is neither education nor 
training to take the easy path of substituting some 
other voice for that which is the organ of God's 
speech to us. We need all the helps that we can 
get, but we need to use them as helps, not as final 
authorities. Any book is dangerous, if it lead us 
to confide in maxims rather than the light of the 
Spirit. Any confessor is dangerous, if we come to 
depend on him rather than on the voice of God 
speaking in our souls. What we want on our jour- 
ney through life is a chart to sail by, not a tug-boat 
to drag us. Our constant tendency is to lean on 
something other than God. To excuse ourselves in 
the taking of the easy way we exaggerate our 
ignorance and incapacity, we look on ourselves as 
spiritual babes, incapable of walking on our own 
feet, and feeding ourselves with our own hands. 
Because we find sympathy and advice pleasant we 
are always seeking it, disregarding the debilitating 
effect it may have upon our souls. So we accus- 
tom ourselves to run to others rather than to God, 
and do not learn to listen to the voice of the Di- 
vine Teacher. Yet he says, ''Ye shall all be taught 
of God." 

I would like to point out that the Sacrament of 
Penance was instituted for the remission of sins 
and the imparting of sacramental grace. It was 
not appointed as a means of getting rid of the 



I AM THE DOOR 147 

moral responsibility of guiding our lives by the in- 
ner voice of God. It was not appointed to enable 
us to escape the spiritual trouble of making up our 
own minds. It was not appointed to relieve us of 
responsibilty for the results of our own action. 
The ends of the Sacrament of Penance have no 
necessary connection with the direction of the 
souls. Going to confession is not going to talk to 
a priest, it is going to talk to God, and there, for 
most part, it ought to stay. All priests are able to 
administer the Sacrament of Penance; few are fit- 
ted to become directors of souls. 

That is not a matter for regret, for few souls 
need any other direction than that which God gives 
them through the conscience. Their very ordinary 
problems of Christian living would present no dif- 
ficulties to them if they would listen attentively to 
the inner voice. If we realize that grace is the 
presence of our Lord in our souls, and that we 
have access to the Father through his Son, Jesus 
Christ, we shall feel that we have a guide that is 
sufficient in the emergencies of life. There is no 
doubt of that inner voice, if we will but lis- 
ten. It is the special promise of the Christian cov- 
enant that God himself shall be our guide and 
friend. 

In saying this I am not for a moment forgetting 
that there is such a thins: as direction of souls, and 



148 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

that such direction is a most valuable part of Chris- 
tian practice. But what is direction? It is the 
bringing to bear the knowledge, the insight, the ex- 
perience, of the expert, upon the complex prob- 
lems of spiritual living, for the purpose of aiding 
those who are as yet unskilled in the life of sancti- 
ty. Direction is direction in the spiritual life. A 
director is not, nor ought any priest to be regarded 
as, an expert answerer of conundrums, or a bureau 
of information, still less as an exterior conscience. 
Direction is a very serious matter, and should not 
be resorted to except in serious affairs. Direction 
is not a synonym for good advice. We need to 
rise to the spiritual plane where we go in and out 
through Christ, and find that enough. 

But this is a day of second-hand knowledge of 
all sorts. We are content to hear about things 
rather than know about them. The mind seems to 
be regarded as an indefinitely expansive reservoir 
into which we can pour floods of unassorted facts 
to its infinite betterment. Education tends to be 
reduced to a continuous moving picture show, the 
spectator of which is supposed to be benefited by 
the sight of anything, no matter how utterly un- 
related to his own life and previous training. 
"Knowledge made easy" is the motto of the time. 
But real knowledge cannot be made easy, for it im- 
plies mental discipline of a high order. Least of all 



I AM THE DOOR 149 

can religious knowledge be made easy. Non-super- 
natural, non-mystical religion can, no doubt be 
made easy; it is taught at the "movies" 
of many places of popular preaching. And 
even when the ideal is purer, there are 
found many who decline intellectual and spiritual 
effort, and are content with hearing about religion. 
So religion, to give it still that name, tends to be- 
come second-hand ; the imitation of some-one else's 
religion; not the religion of personal experience, 
not the forming of Christ in us. But the only re- 
ligion that has any vitality is the religion of per- 
sonal experience. The attainment of that is a high 
and difficult task, the outcome of serious work with 
ourselves. And therein lies the explanation of so 
much that seems to be religion, and also of a good 
deal of revolt from religion. The religion of 
Christ is proposed to one, and what he perceives in 
it is a difficult discipline, checking and interfering 
with his passions and appetites, humbling his pride, 
and obstructing what he considers to be his liberty ; 
and he will have none of it; but in the name of 
free thought and human rights tramples it under 
his feet. Back of how much unbelief, if we could 
only get at the facts, should we find the revolt of 
self-will against the restraints of religion, against the 
pleading of conscience for self-control ? I read the 
other day of a man who thus revolted from re- 



15© THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ligion and put himself deliberately under the in- 
struction of an atheist that he might once for all 
get rid of the discomfort of sin. Fortunately, it 
was a vain attempt; and the Spirit presently con- 
quered him. But without going as far as that, 
how many cases there are where the quest of re- 
ligious experience is declined because of the initial 
demands that a quest promising any success makes 
upon the activities of man. 

There is a quite different case in which the spir- 
itual experience is avoided, but for much the same 
reason — the hard demands it makes. It is the case 
of a person who entirely accepts the religion he is 
taught, and acquiesces in its truth. He does the 
things that whatever authority he is under proposes 
to him. He passes for a very good sort of Chris- 
tian, a most respectable member of the church. But 
his acquiescence in religious teaching is very far 
from being the same thing as the assimilation of 
truth ; the truth he accepts is not digested and made 
into the bone and tissue of a spiritual life. They 
are low forms of life, the Lichens and Algae, of the 
kingdom of heaven. They are very difficult to deal 
with just because of their passive acceptance of all 
teaching. They are such perfect transmitters that 
the spiritual currents generate no heat in them. 
They are careful of forms, and curious about ritual, 
and (it is about the only way in which they show 



I AM THE DOOR 151 

vitality) intolerant of changes in religious practice. 
They will attend divine worship and receive the 
sacraments with some regularity. But there are 
in them no smoldering fires of zeal, no inner heat, 
which will some day break forth in the flames of 
love. Perhaps what they lack is the imagination 
which reveals the possibilities of faith. They can- 
not be made to conceive the Christian faith as 
dynamic, having transforming power — as an organ 
of vision revealing to its possessor the secrets of 
the spiritual world. 

The only adequate religion there is, is the religion 
of experience; and the more complete the religion, 
the deeper the experience it can reveal to us. But 
the acquisition of experience means the applica- 
tion of religion in its fullness to the facts of life. 
It is here clearly a case of the kingdom of heaven 
suffering violence and the violent taking it by force. 
We cannot dream our way to experience, we have 
to force it, each one for himself. Others can help 
us up to a certain point ; they can tell us where and 
how to work; but no one can do the work for us. 
A first-hand knowledge and experience is essen- 
tial. 

We get some light on this matter by noting the 
w r ay in which our Lord taught. "All these things 
spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and 
without a parable spake he not unto them." The 



15 2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

function of the parable is to call out effort, to 
stimulate the intellectual and spiritual powers to 
activity. It excites, in the first place, curiosity; 
and with ineffective dreamers and indifferent lis- 
teners it never gets beyond that — they simply won- 
der what it means and never find out. But in those 
who are capable of spiritual response there is call- 
ed into action the energy that seeks to know. They 
come to our Lord with their question :"What might 
this parable be?" And to them the answer is: 
"Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the 
kingdom of God." Those mysteries our Lord un- 
folds to all earnest seekers — to them he says : "Now 
the parable is this." The mysteries of the king- 
dom remain mysteries to those who are content to 
have them so. The difficulties of faith will remain 
ever' such to those whose eyes have not been 
opened nor ears unclosed by spiritual discipline. 
But to those who would know the mysteries of the 
kingdom, there is "A door opened in heaven," and 
that door is the living Jesus thro' whom we may "go 
in and out and find pasture." Jesus is the Door 
to all mysteries whether of faith or life. The se- 
cret is to know him with a living apprehension, to 
know him and be known of him. "And hereby do 
we know that we know him, if we keep his Com- 
mnndments." So our Lord himself says: "If any 
man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, 



I AM THE DOOR 153 

whether it be of God, or whether I speak of my- 
self." 

The way is very plain : the putting ourselves to 
school to the will of God as manifested in Christ. 
There is no other way to knowledge than the way 
of humble obedience. This is the true simplicity 
of the gospel, that the truth is revealed to those 
who follow in the way in single-hearted obedience. 
This is a way that the "Wayfaring man" need not 
"err in"; for it is not a way of science or philos- 
ophy, but a way of desire, a way motived by love. 
If we seek first, in our quest of spiritual experi- 
ence, to find Jesus, and be not turned aside after 
any other : if when we are told, "behold he is in the 
desert" of "a reduced Christianity" we "go not 
forth :" or "behold, he is in the sleeping chambers" 
of humanitarianism, we "believe it not;" but abide 
"in the way going up to Jerusalem" there to share 
in the experiences of his suffering life, surely he 
will reveal himself to us. Through this life that 
is carefully shaped according to his revealed will, 
light will break; into the midst of the daily duties 
devoutly performed, he will come. Into the inner 
chamber of prayer where we have locked ourselves 
"for fear of the Jews" of earthly desires and dis- 
tractions, he will come and stand and show us his 
wounds and make us sure of his Resurrection and 
abiding Presence and give us his gift of peace. 



154 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Those who have passed in by the Door, and have 
known Jesus, are ever ready to go out in his name 
to testify of him to the world. Those who have 
known our Lord burn with the message which they 
feel that they must deliver. It is a message about 
Jesus — that Jesus is here. All the world's night 
before his Advent was rilled with human cries to 
God: cries of men prostrate before the sacrifices 
they had invented, praying that they might be de- 
livered from their sense of defilement, and yet clear- 
ly conscious that it was "not possible that the blood 
of bulls and of goats should take away sins'' ; men 
crying out of sorrow, out of suffering, out of dis- 
aster, and hearing "no voice nor any that answer- 
ed" : men struggling with the environing mystery of 
life and finding it impenetrable, finding the hea- 
vens over their head brass and the earth under 
their feet iron, echoing to them the sound of their 
own voices. What was there to sustain human 
hope? Only that once and again the silence of the 
night was broken by the voice of some Watchman 
crying from his tower: only that at intervals the 
darkness was shattered by voices crying, "I have 
found, I have heard, I have seen." There was a 
voice out of the heart of the whirlwind, there 
a whisper to a man crouched at the mouth of a cave, 
there was a crying as of a God with a broken heart, 
"Oh that my people would hearken unto me," — but 



I AM THE DOOR 155 

the silences were long. What the voices told men was 
"God is coming." And then there was another 
sound, a sound of singing in the midnight, and dawn 
broke with a shout upon the mountain. It was the 
hour of fulfilled hope, of rewarded expectancy, of 
crowned success: for the message was Immanuel, 
God with us. Jesus is come. 

I sometimes wonder whether anyone can appre- 
ciate the salvation which is in Jesus except that it 
comes to him as deliverance. No doubt, each ex- 
perience has its own wonder and its own sweetness. 
No doubt there is a joy which has its own peculiar 
light of gladness for those who have kept the "dew 
of the morning" which came to them in their bap- 
tism, who have never known what it is to be with- 
out God in the world. But is there not a deeper 
gladness in the hearts of the Twice-born?" In 
the experience of those who have felt what rescue 
means? Surely there is in our Lord's ministering 
a note of very special tenderness for such. The 
lost sheep gets carried in his bosom; the lost coin 
is found, with the calling of neighbors together to 
great rejoicing; the lost son is recovered with feast- 
ing; and the sound of this gladness is echoed in 
the very heavens where the angels rejoice in the 
presence of God. The saints touch this when they 
say: "Oh Felix Culpa"-— Oh happy fault, that re- 
vealed the hidden depths of the loving kindness of 



156 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

our God. Those who know the greatness of their 
escape, whose sense of redemption has in it the 
mingled awe and wonder of the great deliverance 
which has snatched them from the shadows of eter- 
nal death, have upon them the sense of urgency in 
the delivery of their message to their brethren ; they 
have in their hearts for their fellows the pity of 
those who have known. The "Once-born" may 
minister with love and kindness, it is only the 
"Twice-born" who feel the pressure of the Atone- 
ment, who can in the sublimity of their self-giving 
wish themselves "Anathema from Christ" for their 
brethren. 

The message that we have is as the message of 
the sunlight to the dark places of the earth — God 
has revealed himself, Jesus is here. If we would 
bear any effective message to others we must have 
found that true for ourselves. We cannot effec- 
tively preach other men's religion ; we can only ef- 
fectively preach our own. Only converted men, 
whether in pulpits or out of them, can preach the 
Gospel of a great deliverance. Perhaps it is be- 
cause there are so many unconverted men and 
women in our churches, that we find the Gospel of 
sunlight and fresh air and pure water a tolerable 
expression of the Gospel of him who found the 
burden of men's sins so heavy that he was in agony 
in the bearing of them, and his sweat was as it 



I AM THE DOOR 1 57 

were great drops of blood running down to the 
ground. The Gospel of the sunlight is the Gospel 
of those to whom sin is meaningless, and atone- 
ment for sin a theological figment. There are large 
sections of society which find such a Gospel a pleas- 
ant substitute for the "terror of the Lord" where- 
with the Apostle "persuaded men." Smug respect- 
ability, wealth of doubtful origin, social life which 
has thrown off the restraints of "puritanism," find 
not intolerable a religion whose demands can be 
satisfied, not by that "Godly sorrow that worketh 
repentance," but by checks for social service. But 
sin, lawlessness, contempt of law and authority, 
hatred of anything that is in the nature of criticism, 
increases and will increase; for if we can corrupt 
society by money, we cannot thereby reform it. 
The grace of God which alone can make this world 
better cannot be "purchased by money." 

Never was there greater need of outspokenness 
in the presentation of the Gospel of Christ than 
there is to-day. Never was there greater need to 
insist that the religion of Jesus is the religion of 
the Cross, and that the need of the human soul 
which it comes to minister to is the need of sal- 
vation. This needs to be preached to the girls who 
haunt our streets at night, and to the boys in bars 
and gambling dens, who fancy that they are begin- 
ning to "see life" : yes, but it needs most of all to 



I5 8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

be preached in churches where well dressed and 
respectable people are lulled to the sleep of spirit- 
ual death by the superstition that they can be saved 
by philanthropy, by philosophy, by aesthetics. The 
burden of Jesus' preaching was, "repent ye and be- 
lieve the Gospel." That message has grown very dim 
in these times. If the kingdoms of the world are 
to become the kingdoms of God and his Christ there 
is need that they be once more confronted with 
their own wickedness, their alienation from God, 
by the Gospel call to repentance — a call smothered 
by no veils of apology, softened by no dextrous 
adaptation to the lives of luxurious sinners, emascu- 
lated by no removal of its sterner elements; but a 
call, plain and naked in its simple depiction of the 
hatred of God for sin, and his love for sinners. 
That Gospel has never lost its power. It is as 
powerful to-day as ever it was. When is the 
Church going to resume the preaching of it ? When 
is it going to stop speaking to men of the twen- 
tieth century as though they were saints whose 
chief obligation is to show their sanctity by liberal 
contributions, and speak to them, as our Lord and 
his Apostles spoke to men, as those who need sal- 
vation through the limitless grace of God? 

Are we ready to face the world and life as those 
who have experienced this limitless grace, who 
^ave found salvation in Christ, and attained peace 



I AM THE DOOR 159 

"through the blood of his Cross?" Surely if we 
have "gone in" through him to the joys of the re- 
deemed life, that life of intimate union with him in 
which his will has become our will, and 
his mind our mind, and we have in all 
respects offered our lives to him as the medium 
of his self-manifestation: then we are ready to 
"go out" and bear our witness to the "truth as it 
is in Jesus," to the truth that "God is in Christ," 
"reconciling the world unto himself." We know 
this because we have found God in Christ and have 
been reconciled to him. That is the very heart of 
our experience. Are we not bound to speak of 
this ; nay, are we not glad to speak of this, to those 
of the children of our Father who have lost their 
way? You shrink from producing your own per- 
sonal experience : but that is the one effective and 
completely unanswerable argument for the truth of 
the gospel. It is not at all like speaking of your 
own virtues — you would naturally not do that. 
One does not speak of what one has given 
to others, but one is glad to speak of 
what others have given to us. Thus we should 
be glad to tell of our Lord's gifts to us — his gift of 
pardon, his gift of himself in our communions, the 
richness of his answers to our prayers. That we 
have found peace and go in and out in him and 
find pasture — this will bring hope and encourage- 



1 60 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ment to other souls. If only we can learn to do it sim- 
ply and naturally, speak of our Friend as of other 
friends. One dislikes to think of the many souls 
one has not helped in the course of one's life, souls 
that were sent us by God that we might speak to 
them of him. And we missed the moment, and it 
did not come again. There are only certain mo- 
ments when we can helpfully speak, for there needs 
a certain receptivity in the souls that we speak to. 
If we are spiritually alert we perceive the moment. 
You have known it in such and such a case; you 
saw the need, you felt a certain pleading of the 
other that you would help, the words trembled on 
your lips and then you did not say them, but said 
some other thing which shattered the tension of 
the sympathy and forfeited the opportunity and it 
has never returned. Such moments are among 
one's bitterest memories, are they not? We stood 
then in the very place of our Lord, with his mes- 
sage committed to us, — and we failed. What mat- 
ter of repentance ! God grant that we may not be 
met by their reproachful eyes at the last great day ! 

"I say to thee, do thou repeat 

To the first man thou mayest meet 
In lane, highway, or open street, 

That he, and we, and all men move 
Under a canopy of love 
As broad as the blue sky above." 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 

I Am the Good Shepherd. 
Let us try to picture to ourselves — 

©UR Lord preaching. There is a crowd gath- 
ered here by the lakeside and our Lord 
has gone into Peter's boat and sits there 
talking to the people. See their faces eagerly 
turned to him. They have heard much instruction 
in religion from the authorized teachers of their 
nation, but it has not been at all like this. The 
Scribes explain God's law. Jesus explains God. 
If once he can make God plain to them they will 
be ready to obey him. The reason men do not obey 
God is because they do not succeed in seeing him, 
but only some caricature of him. When once 
we see God all desire to disobey passes. That is 

161 
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1 62 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

why our Lord talks about the Father rather than 
about the law. He wants them to see what God is 
like rather than what God commands. And they 
will learn what God is like as they learn of Jesus. 
He is the complete expression of the Father's mind. 
The Jews were so lost in a false reverence of God 
that they would not even speak the Divine Name. 
Our Lord speaks plainly and simply of God as one 
whom they ought to know. They rilled men with 
fear least they should break one of the least of his 
commandments; Jesus filled men with love so that 
they longed to be like the Father. When men fear 
to break God's law they will invent ways of keep- 
ing the letter of it while violating its spirit; but 
when men love God their Father they will be care- 
ful to hold to the very spirit of all his commands. 
With what different feelings we hear the words, 
Laivgiver, and Father ■? That marks the passing 
from the attitude of the Scribe to that of the Chris- 
tian. 

Consider, first — 

That as our Lord's eyes move over these up- 
turned faces, he reads the souls that are mirrored 
there. He will shape his teaching to the needs of 
these souls. Our Lord's teaching is always per- 
sonal, directed to perceived needs. Did you ever 
study the faces of a crowd ? Each face is the record 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 163 

of a history. We can read some of the coarser indi- 
cations; we can see hardness, and cruelty, and de- 
bauchery, and pride, written there. But the sub- 
tler indications are beyond our ken. Our Lord 
saw them. When he read men's thoughts it was, 
no doubt, in the reflection of their thoughts upon 
their faces. What a piteous thing a crowd must 
have been to him : the record of all the hideous 
forms of sin by which men may insult the will and 
scorn the love of God, with here and there some 
relieving marks of a virtue, some traces of an as- 
piration, some foot-print of an accomplished ser- 
vice. Here is that field where he must sow the 
seed of the Gospel — the way-side, the rock, the 
thorns, the good ground. Consider, that our Lord 
shows no hesitation or failure of hope as he goes 
about this task. One would think that the faces 
might have imposed silence ; but they only call out 
love and sympathy. So it has been ever since — the 
work of the Gospel has been the teaching of multi- 
tudes whose spiritual history is written on their 
sin-worn faces; ever trying to find expressions of 
the truth that will penetrate to the sin-hardened 
consciences, and reveal to them the truth about the 
Father — that the Father himself ioveth them and 
willeth that they shall come to the knowledge of 
the truth and be saved. 



164 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Consider , second — 

In the crowds that listen to him our Lord sees 
your face, and reads in it your spiritual history. 
He is interested in it — that is the great fact for 
you ; and he reveals the interest of the Father. We 
often find difficulty in grasping that fact. We can 
think of the Father as interested in humanity; of 
our Lord as coming to save humanity. But that 
thought may leave us unmoved, that thought is not 
energetic enough. Can you think of the Father as 
interested in you; of our Lord as having come to 
save you? What will give vitality to our religion, 
is just that perception of personal interest. Our 
Lord is interested in your personal history, in the 
failures and accomplishments of your life. He 
has some personal words for you. Much of our 
success in the spiritual life depends on our finding 
that personal word. That is the Gospel message 
for me. We read our Gospel and we lay it down 
again with a feeling that we are familiar with that 
chapter which we have been reading ; it is a beauti- 
ful chapter, but it does not mean any more to me 
to-day than it did when I read it the last time; 
nothing new or personal has come out of it. That 
spells failure, does it not? He that hath ears to 
hear, let him hear." And somehow, to-day, we 
have had no hearing ear. For, can we doubt it? 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 105 

there was some special word there for us. We 
know how it is when it finds us, that "winged 
word"; that word of warning, of rebuke, of en- 
couragement, of hope; how it comes with a sense 
of direct message, so that there is no doubt that 
the Holy Spirit has spoken, has taken of the things 
of Christ and shown them unto us. Would that 
we might never close our Bibles except that word 
come. 

Let us, then, pray — 

That our Lord may seek us and find us and re- 
veal himself to us, and that we may not let him go 
except he bless us. 

Show the light of Thy countenance upon us, O 
Lord, that the going forth of Thy word may give 
light and understanding, to nourish the hearts of 
the simple ; and that while our desire is set on Thy 
commandments, we may receive with open heart 
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding; through 
the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

The sight we so often meet on country roads, and 
which rises to the mind when the sheep-flock is 
spoken of, is quite different from what our Lord 
had in mind when he made the shepherd and his 
flock the symbol of the relation between himself 
and his people. We recall a huddled and bewild- 



1 66 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ered flock driven along the dusty highway by men 
and boys and dogs, to me always a very pathetic 
sight and the reverse of inspiring. But to our 
Lord a shepherd meant a man going out of the pas- 
ture lands followed by a flock with which his rela- 
tion was intimate and familiar. He had lived with 
his sheep till there was a mutual knowledge: "my 
sheep hear my voice; and I know them and they 
follow me." 

Hence he could take the shepherd as a figure of 
himself. He is the leader, not the driver, of the 
flock. Our Lord's leadership manifests infinite 
patience, and long-suffering, as indeed does all 
God's dealing with us. As we look back into our 
own experience one of the things which must surely 
strike us is the long-sufTering of God. Our atti- 
tude toward God has been that of petulant child- 
ren, impatient of life's discipline and not seeking to 
understand it, only anxious to be rid of any limita- 
tions which discipline imposes, set upon the accom- 
plishment of our own wills. We can see now in 
the light of our subsequent spiritual experience 
much of the stupidity and sin that marred our lives ; 
and we wonder at our escape into anything like a 
godly life ; but what we most of all wonder at is the 
patience of God which has prevented him from 
leaving our lives to their devices, to wreck them- 
selves upon whatever rock they chose to mistake 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 1 67 

for the Fortunate Isles, to be shattered by whatever 
storm of passion we thought it the inalienable lib- 
erty of our manhood or womanhood to indulge in. 
We find now that through it all the eye of the Good 
Shepherd was upon us, his rod and his staff ready 
for our needs. 

There have been dark days in the Church when 
those who represent Christ as the Shepherd of his 
flock have forgotten the gentleness of Christ and 
the manner of his dealing: when they have substi- 
tuted the drive of intolerance for the attraction of 
the luminous character of the divinely patient Shep- 
herd. But the only kind of leadership which in 
the long run is effective, is the leadership of spirit- 
ual enlightenment which goes before the flock to 
show the way. Are not some, at least of the troub- 
les of the Church at present due to the fact that 
its leadership does not inspire the highest confi- 
dence? One is conscious of belonging to a flock, 
bewildered and uncertain in many matters, which 
looks to its natural leaders for help and comfort 
and finds in them harassed men of business, or 
timid men, anxious to keep peace at all costs, or ob- 
viously confused men who attempt no leadership at 
all. Here and there, to be sure, is a man with a 
purpose to rule, but to rule by the imposition of his 
own will, displaying the spirit of one who drives, 
and reminding one of the Western farmer getting 



1 68 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

his flock to the market, not of the Good Shepherd 
who goes before his sheep. 

What the church needs to-day, we are widely 
told, is more authority; meaning thereby power to 
enforce submission to discipline of some kind. To 
me, force seems the most futile thing in the world, 
effecting at most an unconvinced and hollow uni- 
formity. All the vagaries of individualism are 
better than the level of an intellectual desert that 
is misnamed peace. What we sorely need is not 
more authority, but authority of a different order. 
I believe that human beings, self-willed as they are, 
are ready to follow a leader who appeals to them 
through the spiritual ideals of the Gospel, who 
gives them the spectacle, not of a great politician, 
or a great man of business, but of a great Chris- 
tian. You can never make the individual members 
of any group of men, no matter with what care se- 
lected and combined, think alike in all respects. 
Charles the Fifth, after he had for years exerted all 
the power of his Empire in the vain attempt to re- 
duce Europe to a rigid and uniform ecclesiastical 
system, gave up the attempt and spent his declin- 
ing years tinkering clocks. He found that he could 
make no two clocks run together for any length of 
time. If he had started life as a clock-tinker in- 
stead of so ending it, Europe might have been 
spared much of blood and tears. But men can be 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 169 

drawn to tolerance and peace through the attraction 
of splendid ideals; they can be brought to see that 
their inevitable divergencies of thought are 
of less importance than the unity of ideal which is 
present in all who seek sanctity through union with 
Incarnate God. As the lives of individual Chris- 
tians recede deeper and deeper into the past we 
note that it is that which in life divided them which 
tends to lose importance and vanish; and that that 
which abides is that which united them to our Lord 
and to one another. An Augustine, a Francis, a 
Vincent de Paul, a Laud, a Ken, a Law, a New- 
man, a Keble, a Pusey, stand out to-day in our 
minds detached from the clouds and smoke of con- 
temporary controversy, as men who embody, with 
whatever personal variation, the life experience of 
their Master. And we can see that it was their 
single-hearted devotion to that Master which made 
their lives significant in the annals of Christendom. 
A man's significance to the Church, and his true 
call of leadership, will ultimately have to be mea- 
sured by what of Christ there was in him. We are 
ready, are we not? to trust any man in whom we 
see that the place of leader means going before the 
flock in the spirit of the Good Shepherd, and whose 
ambition is the ambition to make Christ better 
known, who is determined to know nothing among 
us but Jesus Christ and him crucified. 



170 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

All this of course is not to say that it is of no im- 
portance what we think, or believe. It is of great 
and permanent importance what we think and be- 
lieve : but beyond that is the importance of hoiv we 
think and believe it — of what spirit we are of. I 
myself have arrived at certain convictions as the 
result of many years spent in seeking the truth. I 
hold those convictions with all the strength of my be- 
ing. I cannot conceive of their being shaken. But I 
am not therefore inclined to make them the measure 
of other men. The truth of God is too great and 
many sided to be fully comprehended by any one 
mind; it has too many facets for a single mind to 
gather all its light. We need therefore to hold the 
truth we have gained, not in indifference, but in 
love : asking ourselves what is the effect of truth in 
life. Does the truth men claim to possess create 
in them the Spirit of Jesus, or does it create the 
spirit of intolerance and uncharity? The denun- 
ciation of others can be no healthy growth from the 
truth that we possess. If what we think to be 
truth is really such, and we have assimilated it, the 
outcome will be that we see our Lord more clearly 
and have a better understanding of his mind. The 
more people differ from us and denounce us, the 
more we shall be led to tolerance and patience and 
long-suffering. The motto we shall have before 
us is: "when he was reviled, he reviled not again; 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD I?I 

when he suffered, he threatened not; but commit- 
ted himself to him who judgeth righteously." We 
shall ''seek by well-doing to put to silence," not 
only, "the ignorance of foolish men," but the mis- 
judgments and intolerance of learned men. We 
need to remember that the faith a man actually 
lives by is quite often a different faith from that 
which he professes. If we hold the Catholic faith 
and do not live the Catholic life of love and ser- 
vice and patience, there is something vitally wrong 
with the method of our holding it. 

It is well, therefore, in our appreciation of the 
Catholic faith to apply it first of all to ourselves. 
Our instinctive tendency is to apply it to others. I 
suppose we very rarely detach ourselves from the 
mass of people and see ourselves alone before God, 
under his eye. That is essential to our getting to 
know ourselves, as distinguished from our theory 
about ourselves. Theory and truth in this matter, 
I suppose, are never exactly equivalent, but our 
-constant effort must be to make them match. That 
is what self-examination and meditation are in- 
tended to bring about — to individualize the appli- 
cation of our faith. Faith without works, that is, 
results in life, is dead. We must think, not of sin- 
ners, but of this sinner; not of liars, but of this 
liar; not of uncharitable persons, but of this un- 
charitable person. It is easy to condemn sin, and 



172 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

rather useless, unless we condemn it as we have 
identified ourselves with it. Our own weakness is 
not infrequently the result of some tolerated, half- 
perceived sin in ourselves. 

"Perchance some rotten root of sin in thee, 

Has made thy garden cease to bloom and glow : 
Hast thou no need from thine ownself to flee?" 

To seek thus to individualize our faith is to 
stress our personal relation to our Lord. It is this 
relation that he brings out in the parable of the 
Good Shepherd. He here emphasizes his relation 
to men as an individual relation. "I know my 
sheep." That goes very deep. There is much of 
consolation in this truth that we are known of our 
Lord, that we are not lost in the flock, but that his 
eye notes the peculiarity of the individual soul. We 
shrink a little, perhaps, from the thought that all 
that we are he knows — that he sees through all 
that I seem to myself to be, or would be thought to 
be, or even pretend to be. We have doubts at 
times of ourselves — what is the depth, the sincer- 
ity, the reality of our religion? But he has no 
doubts; he is certain when we are not. "I know 
my sheep." 

But when we think into it far enough there is 
much consolation in this thought that our Lord 
knows us. I am never quite sure that I know my- 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 1 73 

self, never quite certain of the purity of my motive 
— that there is not some selfish consideration creep- 
ing in and vitiating my action. I am haunted by 
doubts of my singleness of purpose. By the way, 
it is strange we are so ready to judge the actions 
of others when we cannot get final certainty as to 
our own! I tremble when I have to make impor- 
tant decisions lest my reading of the mind of our 
Lord be clouded by the impulse of my own will. 
But where we are thus hesitant, our Lord knows. 
He knows what is in man, down to his most hidden 
impulses, his most secret motives. This is ground 
for rejoicing, for however bad I am, however much 
of a failure I may seem myself, it would be neither 
consolation nor help to think that our Lord did not 
know. It is just because he does know that he can 
help. He sees my failures; but he also sees my 
limitations, my incapacity, my weakness. And be- 
cause he sees my case thus thoroughly he can help. 
He is master of the case ; he provides for each spec- 
ial need. 

For it is only because our Lord knows that he 
can effectively provide. We rely on his. Provi- 
dence with perfect trust, because we are sure of 
his perfect love and wisdom in dealing with us. If 
we have become sure of this there can be no re- 
bellion against his Providence. How much of the 
unrest of our lives comes from this, that we do not 



1 74 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

accept the providential ordering of life as being the 
thing that is best for us — the thing that we need — 
that the divine Wisdom has fitted, if I may so ex- 
press it, the frame about our lives that best brings 
out the meaning of the picture; that he has given 
us just such a measure of discipline, as is best suit- 
ed to the formation of our spiritual character. St 
Paul throws light on this problem when he says: 
"We know that all things work together for good 
to them that love God." It emphasizes this impor- 
tant fact, that the effect of God's providential ac- 
tion is conditioned by the spirit in which we receive 
it. As the presence of some element in one's phy- 
sical nature will change that which is to most men 
food to poison for us; so the presence of an ad- 
verse spiritual disposition will change the intended 
blessings of God's providence to spiritual disaster. 
What might have been accepted thankfully, or at 
least submissively, as a means of discipline for our 
lives, being rejected with impatience and rebellion, 
turns to a stumbling block and means of offence. 
If the presence of Christ among men did very effec- 
tively judge them, revealing through the attitude 
they took toward him the actual state of their 
souls; if his arraignment before human tribunals 
was less a judgment of him than of Caiaphas, of 
Herod, of Pilate ; so the presence of God to-day in 
the providential setting of our lives is a constant 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 175 

judgment of those lives in that it reveals their in- 
ner meaning, calls out into the daylight what is 
their spiritual worth. Calls it out not that God 
might see — he knows already — but that we may see 
and know ourselves. It is the goodness of God 
leading us to repentance. While our lives are go- 
ing on passively we are able to make ourselves be- 
lieve that our profession of religion is a true and 
loyal allegiance to the will of God, that we love our 
Lord and are devoted to his service. We sit calm- 
ly under our gourd and thank God for the shade 
of it. But when the worm eats it and it withers 
and we are left exposed to the blazing sun, we are 
angry ; we protest that "we do well to be angry even 
unto death." But such dealing with us does not 
reveal God as a hard task-master exacting to the 
uttermost the tale of bricks; it does not show him 
as a grasping householder, gathering where he 
has not strewed; but as the Good Shepherd who 
knows his sheep — knows them far better than they 
know themselves. He is then the Good Physi- 
cian revealing the disease which is silently eating 
out the spiritual life. He reveals tares where we 
had all along thought wheat was growing. And 
that revelation of the self which praised God only 
because it was comfortable and at ease, but is harsh 
and bitter and resentful when God "touches his 



176 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

bone and his flesh," is God's method of telling us 
that our life needs change of some sort. 

It is the call to repentance; but it is not always 
that. We need not to make the inference that dis- 
cipline is the revelation of unknown sinfulness. 
Whether it is or no will become obvious from our 
way of meeting it. If we meet it, as I said, with 
bitterness and rebellion, then sin that we did not 
suspect is made manifest: but if we meet it with 
no such spirit, but rather rejoice that we "are count- 
ed worthy to suffer" for him, then we may be sure 
that the will of the Good Shepherd is leading us 
on to greater perfectness. What we are being 
called to is closer union with the life of our cruci- 
fied Lord. What is being offered us is a greater 
share in his Cross. In the narrative of our Lord's 
passion a certain man "who passed by, coming out 
of the country" was seized and made to bear our 
Lord's cross. How like an accident that seems — 
the mere sport of chance. We can imagine the as- 
tonishment of the man, his fear, his rebellion. 
What had he to do with all this? But are we 
wrong in seeing in this "chance," this "piece of bad 
luck," the very thing that brought the man to the 
knowledge of Jesus and the salvation that is in 
him? The way in which he is mentioned by St. 
Mark implies that he and his family were well 
known in the Christian community when the Gos- 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 177 

pel was written. The accidents of life, the luck, 
good or bad, which befalls us, they are significant 
items in God's dealing with us, voices of the Good 
Shepherd calling us, means which God uses to win 
us and to call us into closer union with himself. 

Wherever I am, if I am there by God's will and 
not through my own self-will, there it is best for 
me to be, and to abide till God's will made known 
to me sends me elsewhere. I am put into a place 
of great responsibility; but if I am certain that 
God placed me there, let me meet the responsibil- 
ities of the place, quietly and humbly as the ser- 
vant of God. I am left in obscurity; that, then, 
is the best place for me, and I do not murmur. 
The kind of life God assigns me is the kind I need 
in order to work out my salvation. There, and 
not otherwhere, can I attain my highest spiritual de- 
velopment. That is the answer to our restlessness 
under the circumstance of life. Hardness or ease, 
pain or joy, he placed me there. He knows, and I, 
knowing that he knows, do not try to see "the dis- 
tant way," being content with the "one step" that 
I do see. But I do know that the way ends in the 
Unveiled Presence — the Presence that, being 
veiled, is with me here and now" 'Are we not all 
guests of Allah ?' says the Arab of the desert, as he 
welcomes the stranger to his tent and showers up- 
on him all that hospitality can suggest. The sim- 
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178 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

pie words well indicate the situation. 'Guests of 
Allah' are we all on our very entrance into the 
world, and 'guests of Allah' we remain to the close 
of our sojourn. We are partakers of a store that 
we have not prepared, spectators of a beauty we 
have not conceived or executed, and sharers in a 
glory we only dimly understand.' " 

Thou hast been with me in the dark and cold, 
And all the night I thought I was alone: 

The chariots of Thy glory round me rolled, 
On me attending, yet by me unknown. 

Clouds were Thy chariot, and I knew them not; 

They came in solemn thunders to my ear; 
I thought that far away Thou hadst forgot, — 

But Thou wert by my side, and heaven was near. 

Why did I murmur underneath the night, 

When night was spanned by golden steps to Thee? 

Why did I cry disconsolate for light, 

When all Thy stars were bending over me? 

The darkness of my night hast been Thy day; 

My stony pillow was Thy ladder's rest; 
And all Thine angels watched my couch of clay 

To bless the soul, unconscious it was blest 

If in these truths we have found the stuff of our 
guidance, it is because of some kinship with our 
Lord, some mutual knowledge. "I know my sheep 
and am known of mine." This is deeper than 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD I 79 

knowing about. The kind of knowledge we have 
of our Lord, which leads us to hear his voice and 
follow him, is not communicated knowledge about 
him, but is knowledge born of the inner sympathy, 
which results from having the same aim, the same 
mind. If this were not so, we might be driven, we 
should never follow. Let us pause for a moment 
and think just how such knowledge as we have of 
our Lord has come to us. There has been, of 
course, the external teaching about him which is as 
the sign-board that directs our steps in the right 
way. There has been the effect of that teaching 
seen in the lives of others, which has been to us an 
indication of its truth and efficacy. But our 
knowledge contains other strands beside. What 
we value most has come to us out of the experience 
of life, out of our consciousness of God's personal 
action in our soul. There are truths that have been 
transmitted in our experience so that they have be- 
come in a special sense ours. To take but one ex- 
ample: we have all of us, I fancy, learned the 
strength of dependence, that truth that St. Paul 
states when he says, "when I am weak, then am I 
strong." We started life in the spirit of self-suf- 
ficiency which is a part of the equipment of youth; 
and then life closed in upon us and we experienced 
failure after failure. And out of this "spoiling of 
our goods" we came to know that self-sufficiency is 



1 80 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

weakness, and that we must be controlled and sup- 
ported if we are to make any sort of success of 
life. We have ceased to look on life as a field of 
easy conquests, and to murmur "who is sufficient 
for these things?" In our failure we have been 
driven back to God as the ultimate and real source 
of strength: our lives have become trusting and 
faithful — "all my fresh springs shall be in thee/' 
Perhaps we cannot follow every step of this trans- 
mutation, or tell how or when it took place. But 
we know that it has taken place and that our ma- 
ture experience is one of humility and trust where 
once there had been the pride of self-reliance. To 
this extent Christ has been formed in us: so far 
we know him and his power. 

Again and again as we have progressed in the 
power of spiritual living this process of transmuta- 
tion has been repeated, whereby a truth of teach- 
ing has passed into an acquired truth of the inner 
life. In some instances we have yielded readily 
enough to our Lord's guidance, and have been 
glad of the conviction that came. But other cases 
have presented difficulty, and our nature has 
shrunk back when we saw whither we were being 
led — for the Good Shepherd leads us out into places 
where naturally we would not go. That, of 
course, is the inner meaning of guidance — that we 
are enticed by our trust in a higher wisdom, we 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD l8l 

are drawn on by "the bands of love." It is the 
sight of One going on before that arouses us and 
brings us to action. With our eyes fixed on the 
Good Shepherd we can forget at times where the 
path runs and be conscious only of following him. 
It is well if this be so with us, and the burden of 
the way be lightened because we are sustained by 
love. For the path that begins in the meadows and 
runs by the still waters goes outward and upward, 
till there is revealed a hill in the distance, and on 
the hill stands a Cross. 

Are we ready to follow as far as that? Or are 
we going to stop where the road slopes upward? 
"I lay down my life for the sheep." Are we 
ready to go as far as that? There are many ways 
of laying down the life; every life must find some 
way, must it not? "Whosoever will save his life 
shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for 
my sake shall find it." We must find some way of 
losing ourselves in self-identification with our 
Lord. "My sheep follow me" — into what paths 
of service? 

May I say a word here, not to everyone, but to 
any one into whose hands this book may fall whose 
life is still free to be offered wholly to our Lord 
in a specially consecrated service ? There are those 
whom our Lord calls to be in a very special way 
his ministers to others, either in a life of service; 



182 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

or in a life of prayer. Of such we say they have 
vocation, whether it be to the priesthood or the re- 
ligious life, or to some other special form of ser- 
vice. To such our Lord's words may be applied 
in a very special sense "My sheep hear my voice, 
and I know them and they follow me." And yet 
such is the "disquietude of this world," with its 
many disturbing voices, that it is sadly possible for 
the call to come and go by unheeded. It comes or- 
dinarily through the circumstances of our life. The 
young find life opening before them and that they 
are free to choose its direction. The Providence 
of God has "set their feet in a large room." They 
experience the exhilaration of freedom — that "the 
world is all before them" ; or they feel responsibil- 
ity for it, the responsibility to direct well their 
choice. In such cases the soul offers itself to our 
Lord in an act of seif-consecration that is per- 
fectly definite — offers itself to his holy will to be 
guided to a choice for future which shall be in ac- 
cord with that will. And then it should listen, re- 
peating the act of self-oblation from time to time, 
especially at the times of its communion. We 
should always assume under such circumstances 
that God wants a special service from us. It may 
he a service "in the world," as we say; or it may 
be that he would have us "sell all and follow him." 
We have no right to make our natural impulses and 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 183 

desires the test in such a case, or assume that we 
are not "fitted" for a life of special service. Still 
less have we the right to make the opinions of 
worldly friends and relatives the test. We should 
in the first instance listen only to God, and if he 
"puts into our minds good desires," if the thought 
of special consecration grows in force and clear- 
ness while we pray day by day for guidance, while 
we offer ourselves with growing intensity, we must 
heed this as the voice of the Divine Shepherd call- 
ing his sheep. We must yield ourselves, and 
pray, "draw me and we will run after thee." We 
should do well for a while not to complicate our 
seeking by looking to the distracting of voices of 
human opinion and advice. As vocation is so 
purely personal a transaction between God and the 
soul it is best kept free from other intervention till 
the time comes when we need the expert advice 
that shall guide our final decision. The experience 
of many years has convinced me that vocations are 
frequently stifled and frustrated by the asking of 
advice of ignorant or interested persons at a period 
when the soul should be simply submitting it- 
self to God. For our Lord does not, "strive, nor 
cry/' but his voice comes to us through the silence 
of our prayers, in the hush of our communions in 
the moments when we have "swept and garnished" 
the house of our life, and are quietly holding opea 



184 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

the door that he may come in. "Behold," he says, 
"I stand at the door and knock" ; but the knocking 
is so gentle that the sound of it may be drowned in 
the shouting of our passions, in the tumult of a 
life that has made the world its guest. He forces 
no one's freedom, he compels no one to serve, he 
constrains no one's love : but there is a wistfulness 
in his voice when he says/'// any one willeth to 
come after me" — and if anyone does will, then he 
holds out to them the priceless guerdon of his ser- 
vice, the privilege of union with him in his redemp- 
tive work, the high reward of bearing after him 
his Cross. It is sad to think how many lives he 
has fashioned for this service and called to the 
privileges of the ministry have let the call pass un- 
noticed, and in their heedlessness or in their fear 
"have fled and hid themselves among the stuff" of 
world-consecrated interests. 

"I lay down my life for the sheep." We, if we 
are faithful, will follow thus far, finding some form 
of self-giving by which we render our lives back to 
him. But we are liable to stop there in thought — 
to stop at the point where we have gone up Cal- 
vary with him and have seen the Cross. That mis- 
understanding of the Cross as the final phase of 
our spiritual experience is one of the mistakes 
which gives to the life of the Christian an aspect of 
unnecessary hardness. The Cross is not a stop- 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 185 

ping place. It was not final in our Lord's life, nor 
can it be final in ours. The path leads up the hill 
where the Cross rises upon the summit; but when 
we get there we find that the path does not end at 
the foot of the Cross but leads on over the hill. 
From the Cross-crowned, summit there is revealed 
to us the vine-covered slopes and the valleys that 
laugh and sing in all the splendor of the Promised 
Land. "I lay down my life that I might take it 
again, I have the power to lay down, and I have 
the power to take it again." 

And we follow to the end, beyond the Cross to 
the Risen Life. The Risen Life is not altogether 
future to us, we enter upon it even now, because 
we are even now in Christ and have a share in all 
his experience. It is an imperfect view of the 
Christian life which only sees it as crucified. We 
are not only crucified with Christ, but we are risen 
with him, — we are risen and ascended and lifted 
up to dwell with him in heavenly places. We are 
already, if we have been found faithful, entered 
upon our Lord's life of triumph. He triumphs in 
us and we triumph in him. This is not a mystic 
piece of symbolism but the plain fact of the Chris- 
tian life, a matter of daily experience, if we will 
have it so. The power and presence of the Risen 
and Ascended Jesus has entered our lives and we 
triumph thereby. We triumph over pain, over 



1 86 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

sin, over fear, over death. If we are using our 
Lord's presence our days are marked, not by de- 
feat, but by victories. Sin and failure are not the 
characteristic features of the life of the Christian, 
but rather its conquests. We are conquering one 
by one the temptations that beset us, we are winning 
one by one the virtues that are in him. Not fear 
and shame and sorrow, but joy and gladness are in 
the "dwellings of the righteous," and our lives ex- 
pand with the happy consciousness of our victories. 
We go on our way rejoicing, as pilgrims of hope, 
and at the end it shall be written of us as of St. 
Francis, "he died singing." This is the true fol- 
lowing of Christ, which follows to where he is now 
in the joy of his triumph. And we can so follow 
because we are not alone — he is with us all the 
time. 



In pastures green ? Not always ; sometimes He 
Who knoweth best, in kindness leadeth me 
By weary ways, where heavy shadows be. 

And by still waters? No; not always so; 
Oft-times the heavy tempests round me blow, 
And o'er my soul the waves and billows go. 

But when the storm is loudest, and I cry 
Aloud for help, the Master standeth by 
And whispers to my soul, "Lo, it is I." 



I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD 187 

Above the tempest wild I hear Him say, 
"Beyond this darkness lies the perfect day, 
In every path of thine I lead the way." 

So, whether on the hill-tops high and fair 

I dwell, or in the sunless valleys where 

The shadows lie — what matter? He is there. 



I AM THE VINE. 
Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 

I Am the Vine. 

And let us picture to ourselves — 

^^*HE meeting of a Christian congregation in 
^^- that early time when the Church was suf- 
fering persecution. It is in the house of 
some well-to-do member of the Church, situated, 
we will imagine, in the suburbs of the city. It is 
early dawn, and the light is streaming up the East- 
ern sky, touching the hill-tops with rose and silver ; 
but down here in the valley it is still dark, the 
shapes of things are indistinct shadows. Men are 
coming hastily, yet with silent steps, to the gate of 
the Villa, through which they pass, after accustom- 
ed signs to the guardian, and go into the room pre- 
pared for their worship. It is a strange group seen 
here in the lamp-light, a group in which social dis- 

189 



190 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

tinction has no place. Here, alone in the world per- 
haps, you can see men and women of all states of 
life, not simply gathered into one place, but fused 
by some invisible power into a unity. Master and 
slave, soldier and civilian, patrician and proletar- 
ian, they are all one by some subtle bond that they 
all feel and act upon. They are lifted out of their 
individual separateness and knit together in a higher 
unity. See them, as the bishop and his attendant 
clergy come forth and take their places about the 
Holy Table, become eagerly attentive to his words, 
joining in prayer and response, as moved by a com- 
mon impulse. There is one spirit in this Body 
whose members are so divided in the outer world 
to which they will presently go back; and we 
gather, as the service goes on, that this spirit is a 
response to some unseen Presence that they all 
feel and are certain of ; a Presence that tends more 
and more to localize itself at the Holy Table where 
the Sacred Symbols are set out before the bishop — ' 
a Presence which grows in distinctness till it cul- 
minates at the reception of the Elements in a 
sense of personal possession and joy. 

Consider, first — 

That this culmination of the service in participa- 
tion in the Communion is the key to the under- 
standing of the unity that we feel among these 



I AM THE VINE 191 

men and women. They are one, and they feel that 
they are one, because they have been gathered into 
unity with their living Master. What we have 
been looking at is no act of commemoration of a 
dead Lord, but is intelligible only as it is filled with 
a living Presence. Jesus lives. Jesus is here; 
and his Incarnate Life has outspread and embraced 
all these and gathered them into union with him- 
self. Their perception of union one with another 
is the result of their being in him. And because 
they are in him, they have been raised to a higher 
equality, in the presence of which the low inequal- 
ities of human society vanish. There are here no 
distinctions; no rich nor poor; no bond nor free, 
but all are one in Christ Jesus. They have been 
baptised into the One Body, and are become par- 
takers of the One Bread. And their sense of their 
unity is so vital a thing that it will not vanish when 
they separate after the Blessing and go forth, in 
the now full light of the morning, to their various 
vocations. They will carry the sense of their re- 
lation with them, and when they meet in the street, 
in the market place, in the service of the house, 
there will be a smile on the lips and a light will 
pass from eye to eye. The master will receive the 
service of the slave with a sense of the redeemed 
manhood and simple human dignity of the servant 
which will make him gentle and grateful for the 



I9 2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

service rendered. The slave will offer his service 
as from brother to brother, in the memory of him 
who was among his brethren as one that serveth. 
This which seems to us impossible, was then pos- 
sible because of the deep sense of the brotherhood 
in Christ as affecting all life in all its relations, and 
not, as with us, certain corners of life labelled ''re- 
ligious." 

Consider, second — 

That is the misery of our present state, that we 
have lost all the keenness of the sensation of unity. 
We have obliterated the sharpness of the definition 
between the Church and the world, and in doing so 
have lost the sense of belonging one to another be- 
cause we first belong to Christ. Let us be frank 
with ourselves: have we resumed the sense of so- 
cial and class distinction that the first enthusiasm 
of the Gospel obliterated among those who formed 
the early Christian assemblies? Is there any defi- 
nite content to the notion "brother" in our minds? 
Do we feel drawn to others because they are Chris- 
tians, members of the same congregation, worship- 
ping at the same altar, receiving the same sacra- 
ments? Do we make any attempt to know our 
brothers and sisters? Do we ever go into any 
house and say we have come because we are of the 
same faith? Are we even interested in the work 



I AM THE VINE 193 

that certain other members of the same family of 
God are trying to do ? Do the clergy of the Church 
get ready sympathy and help from us in their, work, 
or do we treat it as a matter that is no concern of 
ours? If we are obliged to answer such questions 
as these in a way that we feel certain that no mem- 
ber of the congregation we have been thinking of 
would have answered, what does brotherhood mean 
to us — anything? Conditions of life, no doubt, 
change; but have they changed in such wise as to 
justify the present lack of interest in one another 
which characterises the modern Christian congre- 
gation? "The brother for whom Christ died" is 
as much a reality to-day as in the first century. Is 
he a reality to you in your daily life? To whom 
does the common participation in the benefits of the 
Passion and Death of Christ link you ? 

Let us, then, pray — 

For an increased sense of the un!ty of the mem- 
bers of the Church one with another. Let us pray 
that we may find in our faith a bond of union with 
all that share it. 

Bless, O Lord and Father, Thy Family, Re- 
deemed by the Precious Blood of Thy dear Son, 
and enlightened by the Gift of Thy Holy Spirit, 
and fill them with Thy Spiritual gifts; grant them 
love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, 
(14) 



1 94 THE SF.LF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

hope, faith, charity ; that being replenished with all 
Thy gifts, they may attain their desire of coming 
safe unto Thee; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, 
our Saviour. 

When our Lord describes his relation to us un- 
der the symbol of the vine and branches he is at- 
tempting to convey to us some notion of the central 
mystery of the Christian life, the mystery of our 
union with him. I have been, and no doubt in the 
future shall be, so insistent on this, the basal fact of 
our religion, that I am not now going to dwell on 
the fact itself, but rather on some deductions from 
it. It is a fact so rich and significant in practical 
application, that we can make no pretentions to ex- 
haust its meaning, but can only lightly touch upon 
the borders of it. 

Let us think, then, in the first place, of our spirit- 
ual life as a dependent and derived life. Just as 
the stream depends every moment of its existence 
upon the fountain, and will dry up if the fountain 
ceases to send forth the waters which are its life, 
so we depend on Christ, who is the inexhaustible 
source of our spirit's energy. Or, to return to our 
Lord's own symbol, the twigs and leaves and flow- 
ers of the vine are each moment living and growing 
by virtue of the life-giving sap that flows forth to 
them from the central trunk. Spiritual health, 



I AM THE VINE 1 95 

spiritual strength, spiritual existence are impossi- 
ble apart from Christ. 

If at any moment the vital connection between 
the vine and the branch is interrupted the effect on 
the branch is disastrous. The energy is reduced 
or abolished, and it at once tends toward death. 
Nothing can save it except the removal of the ob- 
struction and the restitution of the circulation. 
That which impedes or entirely interrupts the vital 
connection between our spirits and the source of 
our spirit's life, is sin. Hence the importance of 
sin and inevitability of the stress laid upon it in 
Christian teaching. It is possible to think of 
sin lightly, and to speak of it as of small conse- 
quence, only if we neglect its necessary effect in in- 
terrupting the action of the spiritual life by sever- 
ing it from its source. And just because sin has 
this importance it is necessary in our thought of it 
to see where its evil lies, and lay our emphasis in 
the right place. 

I am inclined to think that in our thought of sin 
we dwell too much upon it as it is a violation of law. 
Our thought naturally tends to legalism, and to rest 
in the superficial fact of the breaking of law as a 
sufficient account of sin and of God's attitude to- 
ward it. The Supreme Law-giver, we call God; 
thereby, through a poor analogy, getting one of the 
most imperfect conceptions of God we could gain. 



I96 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

There will always remain in our conception of law 
an element of arbitrariness, the feeling that the law 
might have been otherwise, and if so, the guilt of 
breaking the law will seem less. But the laws of 
God are the self-expression of God and could not 
be otherwise ; and that puts the violation of the law 
or sin on some deeper basis than just the violation of 
an arbitrary enactment. We ask, why is the violation 
of a divine law so disastrous? Because it exposes 
us to penalty ? That is one side of it, certainly : but 
a limited side, unless you attach some extended 
meaning to the word penalty. Because it is a 
breach of sympathy showing that the sinner is no 
longer in sympathy with the thought of God? Yes, 
that is included, and is disastrous. But there is a sig- 
nificance of sin deeper than that. The most complete 
account of it is that it is a hindrance to the opera- 
tion of the Divine Life. The life that flows forth 
from our Lord and is imparted to us that we may 
live in him and by him, is obstructed in its action 
by the operation of sin. Sin is an interruption of 
the life of union. The water is dammed back in 
the fountain ; the sap is driven back to the roots. 

The branch is cut off and withered — that is what 
we call mortal sin. What a terrible thing it is to 
look at — that withered branch! It had once been 
in the vine, a part of the vine's life. It had had 
the power of growth and fruitfulness. That soul 



I AM THE VINE 197 

was once a Christian soul, was once full of the life 
of grace, once fruitful in good works. And see it 
now ! How dead and cold it is ! And yet we may 
not recognize the state of the man for what it is, 
and the man himself may not recognize it. That is 
one of the awful things about death, that the dead 
thing has ceased to feel. The dead soul has ceased 
to feel any reproach of the conscience, any need of 
God. It has become indifferent to all the work of 
(Christ for it, impatient of all the appeals of relig- 
ion. Very likely it is filled with intellectual con- 
ceit, with a sense of superiority to the Gospel of 
Jesus. It sneers at the virtues of the Christian life 
as the qualities of weaklings. It looks back at the 
days when it followed the religion of Jesus as days 
of superstition from which it is now happily eman- 
cipated. 

We are not in that state. We cannot be in that 
state so long as we are, however feebly, attempting 
to follow the guidance of the Spirit to a better life. 
But there is in the experience of those who are, on 
the whole, making some effort to live Christianly, 
an approach to this state of mortal sin — a drift to- 
ward it. This is the state of habitual venial sin. 
If we are accustomed to search our conscience with 
any thoroughness, we have found from time to 
time in our lives sins that we tolerate ; sins that we 
are not hating. Now it is one thing, through weak- 



1 9^ THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ness or surprise, or through strong temptation, to 
fall into sin — sin that on the whole we did not mean 
to commit, and quite another thing to discover in 
ourselves sins that we like and excuse. There may- 
be some degree of repentance for them, there may 
be spasmodic struggles against them; but they re- 
main, and on the whole they remain, because we 
want them to remain. They are usually not what 
we would call dark sins; nor sins by which we 
make obvious gain. There are other sins that give 
us a certain pleasure; sins that are the expression 
of some innate weakness of character. There are 
people, for instance, whose sense of truth is very 
defective; who are unable, it would seem, to ap- 
preciate the subtle graduations between truth and 
untruth. They are unable to narrate events accur- 
ately or to repeat statements exactly. The state- 
ment that they repeat is altered by a difference of 
shading, of emphasis, of tone, till the impression it 
conveys is utterly falsified from the original. There 
are those whose vividness of imagination, whose 
sense of the dramatic, over-rides their sense of ac- 
curacy. To them it is more important that what 
they tell should be effective than that it should be 
true. They see in an event the possibility of a 
good story — and why should a good story be spoiled 
for so small a thing as exactitude of detail ? They 
are feebly artistic natures that tend to embellish 



I AM THE VINE 199^ 

what passes through their hands. Then there is 
the genus of irresponsible talkers, mere chatterers, 
afflicted with an unrestrainable flow of words, who, 
for the most part, one fancies, do not at all know 
what they say : who attach no sense of responsibility 
to the gift of speech. They abound in gossip, and 
are likely to have a malicious twist in their nature 
that gives their gossip a sting. They are afflicted 
with an idle curiosity, and have a capacity for in- 
teresting themselves in the petty. There are those 
whose imaginations are diseased and who delight 
in the vulgar or the salacious, whose anecdotes 
touch the limits of the decent. Or, in sins of an- 
other order, think of those who are of a morbid or 
morose temperament ; who are suspicious of others' 
meaning, and are in constant expectation of being 
slighted or ignored or neglected; who watch one's 
face or gesture or emphasis to extort from them 
food of offense. 

I am not saying that these and the like are great 
sins. My point is that they are not. What I am 
insisting on is that they are the sort of sins that 
human beings treat with indulgence, if not affection, 
and make no adequate effort to overcome. They 
necessarily come before them again and again in 
their self-examination, unless they are spiritually 
blind ; and the frequency of their occurrence causes 
them no more than a passing twinge of conscience, 



200 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

and leads to no persistent effort to change. But 
they are there, gnawing at the spiritual vitals, cor- 
roding the spiritual springs of life. The soul abides 
in a permanent state of tolerated venial sin which 
must be ultimately destructive of spiritual life. It 
may be a very small worm that is eating at the heart 
of the branch, but if it eats long enough the branch 
is cut through and falls to the ground — it no longer 
abides in the union of the vine. 

One of the commonest symptoms of the presence 
of tolerated venial sin is spiritual sloth. It is spir- 
itual sloth, indeed, born of the sin that prevents us 
from dealing with. And the sloth extends itself 
to other fields of spiritual activity. The soul be- 
comes negligent in prayer, in preparation for its 
sacraments, and thus being in an unresponsive state 
gets no fruit of them. Duties of certain kinds that 
are not in themselves agreeable to the person are 
left undone. Thus issues what one might perhaps 
call a partial paralysis of the spiritual nature. Even 
in health, physiologists tell us, there are spots on 
our bodies where we do not feel at all or feel less 
intensely ; so there seem to be in certain souls dead 
spots. There sin does not produce the reaction of 
conscience, or only a slight reaction. The total ef- 
fect of all this is to reduce the spiritual vitality. The 
circulation of the life of the branch is impeded. We 
fall into a low spiritual condition. You have no- 



I AM THE VINE 201 

ticed in a shrub, perhaps, a branch where the leaves 
are undergrown and the blossoms puny : you know 
that there will be no fruit there. You have noticed 
in your life, perhaps, a lack of fruit in certain places : 
well, it were well to look into the matter to see 
where the trouble lies and to find why the life of 
the vine is impeded in its circulation in you. 

We are all of us limited in our development — 
otherwise we should be saints already instead of 
aspiring to sanctity. We have failed of any com- 
plete answer to the command, "be ye therefore per- 
fect." Our obligation is to be constantly seeking the 
meaning of our limitation and discovering remedies 
of it ; certainly not to rest in the fact that we are al- 
ready active. The self-satisfaction that is liable 
to accompany the doing of many things is one of 
the dangers that are ever present to the active. It 
leads us to confuse quantity of work with quality. 
So long as we are occupied we seem to be making 
progress. But progress in what? Activity is not 
the synonym of spirituality. We need to scan the 
nature and motive of our activity if we will know 
its quality, its bearing, that is to say, on our own 
spiritual development — whether our activity is of 
such a kind as to release the spiritual energy that is 
communicated to us, making our work a supernat- 
ural operation of grace, or whether it is but a natu- 
ral activity, a response to taste or social pressure. 



202 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

It is only in the former case that it is of a nature to 
remove or push further back the limitations which 
hinder our development, and make it possible for 
us to go on nearer to perfection. 

For we are supposed to have no limitations. The 
Gospel assumes the possibility of all men attaining 
its ideal. That, we say to ourselves, is an impos- 
sible ideal. But that is just what it is not. Cer- 
tainly, we have not fulfilled it: but it must remain 
our ideal, or our spiritual endeavor will come to a 
stop. Our ideal is the ideal of the perfect man; 
that we are to grow up to when Christ Jesus is 
formed in us, and the space by which we at pres- 
ent fall short of it, is the measure of the distance 
which still separates us from full conformity with 
our Lord. When that space is traversed we shall 
be at the end of our course : but now we must push 
forward on our pilgrimage, eager for perfection. 
Here as elsewhere, the true measure of life is its de- 
sire and not its accomplishment. In accomplish- 
ment we may be bettered by circumstance and hin- 
dered by the uncontrollable accidents of life: we 
may mistake and blunder and fail, so it seems, of 
any accomplishment at all; but we can hardly be 
mistaken about our desires; and they may burn in- 
tensely even when the brain and hand show them- 
selves incompetent to carry them to effect. Some- 
times, indeed, the love of our Lord which is in our 



I AM THE VINE 203 

heart finds it difficult to discover any means of ex- 
pression manward, and on that very account may 
reach more intense expression Godward. In such 
a case we have a life which is called of God to in- 
terior activities of love, of penance, of intercession; 
of which the outward effects, though difficult to es- 
timate, are none the less of a high order. There 
is no spiritual activity that is resultless : 

"There is no drop but serves the slowly lifting tide: 
No dew but has an errand to some flower; 
No smallest star but sheds some helpful ray." 

The vine and the branches make but one body; 
we are not only "members of Christ/' but ''mem- 
bers one of another." While the space that this 
truth has filled in the thought of recent years has 
made it perfectly familiar to us, a mere common- 
place of our speaking, it can hardly be said that it 
has become fundamental to our action — it has had 
small practical effect hitherto. It moves us specu- 
latively and emotionally. It underlies, for instance, 
the vast amount of talk that there has been on the 
subject of peace, international and other. If we 
only attended meetings or read speeches we should 
think that the world was moving rapidly toward a 
state in which war would be impossible. But it is 
plain that we have only theoretic interest in peace, 
an interest in peace in matters where we are not 



*04 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

personally concerned. But let questions arise which 
touch us, and our dreams of peace go for nothing, 
and we make us ready for battle. We fall back 
into the old dialect and talk about national honor, 
and the impossibility of arbitration in the specific 
case. The same atmosphere of unreality surrounds 
our professions of brotherhood in our social deal- 
ings. There are large philanthropic professions: I 
doubt if there has ever been a time of more intense 
hostility between different sections of society. The 
Socialist movement which talks beautifully of 
brotherhood, yet expects to get its results through 
class struggle, by setting brother against brother 
in the bitterest of all wars. Class antagonism is 
capitalized to an enormous extent in the operations 
of labor and capital. A tremendous amount of our 
legislature is directed to give some financial ad- 
vantage to this or that class. In the active busi- 
ness of life the fact that all men are brothers would 
seem to be quite the last thing thought of. And 
in our more intimate social relations is not the same 
thing observable? We are all brothers in our mo- 
ments of expansion, when we dwell unctiously on 
the platitudes of speculation : but it does still make 
a vast difference to us how our brothers dress and 
eat and lodge. We do not feel the bond of brother- 
hood tightening between us and the man across the 
hotel table who has weird methods of managing his 



I AM THE VINE 205 

food-supply. I have known quite eminent Chris- 
tians make complaint of the odor of the tenement 
house children in the next pew. We are not above 
being repelled by peculiarities of dress. 

The trouble would seem to be that in our theoriz- 
ing we have left out an essential element of the 
problem. We have arrived at a purely human 
notion of brotherhood which breaks down under 
the strain of practical application. We have not 
added to it the complementary term in Christ, 
which will alone give our nation energy and make it 
function. Men are rather fond of borrowing truths 
from the gospel and then, evacuating them of their 
supernatural character, attempting to make them 
work as merely human truths. Belief in brother- 
hood, which is the chief asset of humanitarianism, 
will not work except as a part of a supernatural sys- 
tem. We arrive at brotherhood in the full sense by 
being taken into Christ, and apart from him we can 
do nothing in this matter. I anticipate the ob j ection : 
it is true that we cannot be said to be doing very 
much with it in any case. But that is because we 
have not yet got to much social understanding of 
what being a Christian means. Most men are still 
in the stage of thinking it means being good in 
some personal and private sense, in some restricted 
sphere of activity. It seems to be possible through 
this artificial and non-natural restriction of the 



206 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

sphere of the application of Christian principle, for 
a man to be good, a good member of the church, 
etc.,while he remains the director of the company 
or the head of the business which is conducted on 
lines of oppression, or indulges in activities which 
are only moral if moral means legal ; which does not 
ask, is it right, is it just, but only can it be done 
within the law. A Christian society, I suppose, 
we have never seen, nor would it appear to be with- 
in the range of telescopes of the highest power as 
yet invented. Individual Christianity we have 
seen: social Christianity — no. And that because 
we have not yet understood the meaning of "in 
Christ" as applied to all members of the Christian 
family. 

We speak a Christian language without attribut- 
ing a Christian meaning to our words. It is inter- 
esting (and disheartening) to trace this process of 
emasculation of Christian thought. We are very 
tolerant to-day : and it is difficult to take up a mod- 
ern book dealing with religious or social questions 
which has not something to say of the intolerance 
of the Christian Church ; at least in the past. The 
narrowing effects of religion we are constantly 
warned against. But is tolerance, which I take ta 
be a charitable bearing with those who differ from 
us, without losing sight of the fact and importance 
of the difference, really a wide-spread virtue? I 



I AM THE VINE 207 

say, a true tolerance does not exist where that 
which separates us is conceived as of no import- 
ance. If the contrary opinion or action of another 
is of no importance, what we feel is not tolerance, 
but indifference. And that, in fact, is what is so 
highly prized and so widely manifested to-day. 
Men are indifferent to truth, and therefore tolerant 
in this sense. Religious indifference is perhaps the 
most outstanding phenomenon of the present situa- 
tion. People are intolerant of any opinion because 
they cannot conceive that any opinion in the matter 
of religion can be of importance. It makes no dif- 
ference what you believe, is the foundation of the 
modern creed. Therefore men can look back at 
Middle Ages, for instance, with horror and con- 
tempt. But when you meet men holding opinions 
to which they really attribute importance, do you 
find them markedly tolerant? Let the priest who 
has a congregation made up from the mercantile 
class preach of brotherhood in the sense in which 
Socialists understand it, and what will happen? I 
know of a priest who was warned that if he accept- 
ed a certain parish he would have to keep 
silent on the political opinions he was known to 
hold — not silent in the pulpit, but silent in the or- 
dinary relations of life. We know that there are 
dozens of questions which will stir the religiously 
tolerant man to intolerance — that one of the secrets 



208 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of successful intercourse with our brothers is 
knowing when to keep one's mouth shut. Human 
beings are just as intolerant to-day everywhere as 
in the Middle Ages. 

Would it not be well for Christians to ask them- 
selves how far they are using the cloak of tolerance 
as an excuse for their worldliness? The Christian 
community is invisible as such: it is inextricably 
mingled with the world. The line of demarkation 
between the church and the world was once very 
clear and decided. It was easy to find on which 
side of the line a man stood, and I do not believe 
that we can have any healthy church life (we may 
possibly maintain a healthy individual life) till we 
remark this difference. The coming out of the 
world of the early Christians was a mark of spirit- 
ual health. We avoid making any such distinction 
because of an utterly absurd theory that the world, 
society, has been converted and is now Christian. 
The rise of this theory was contemporaneous with 
the degeneration of the Church. It was when men 
began to talk of a Christian empire, Christian king- 
doms, the Christian world, that the outlines of the 
Christian Church became blurred, and men thought 
that they could be Christian without separation 
from the world. Those who are Christians in any- 
thing more than a nominal sense belong to the 
Vine, to the Body of Christ, and the member of 



I AM THE VINE 209 

Christ cannot at the same time be members of the 
harlot that the world is. A Christian must be 
known, not only as one who stands for something, 
holding a private creed that is tolerated so long as 
he does not press it, but as one who stands against 
something, and stands so firmly that his standing 
may be expected to arouse opposition. His atti- 
tude must be one of continual protest. 

It is implied in the cleansing of the fruitful 
branch that the process of our conformity to Christ 
is one that ceaselessly goes on when the life is in a 
a healthy state. The process of our moral and 
spiritual growth brings into evidence defects that 
we had not suspected and which need to be rectified 
through the closer application of Christian princi- 
ple — spots where the soul is tarnished which need 
the cleansing application of a Saviour's blood. 
"Wash me thoroughly" — wash me more and more. 
The true stress of the Christian life is upon this pro- 
gressive cleansing which fits us to receive and trans- 
mit more of Christ. I fancy that we do not yet 
dream of the possibilities of our spiritual nature, 
here in this world, if we were to co-operate with 
God in bringing it to the development it is capable 
of. And yet we have had before our eyes through- 
out the history of the church object lessons of the 
possibilities of spiritual action where the whole life 
is spiritualized by its union with our Lord. But 
(15) 



2 lO THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

we insist upon regarding the results of such spirit- 
ual action with suspicion, or upon brushing them 
aside as manifestly false. Being Christians, we 
still include among the axioms that we regard as 
self-evident, the axiom of materialistc unbelief, 
"miracles do not happen," — an axiom which we 
curiously suspend in its application when we are 
dealing with the miracles of the Bible. Just what 
miracles are, is, of course, largely a matter of defin- 
ition, which I do not pause to discuss. The point 
I wish to emphasise is that the history of Chris- 
tianity offers us a continuous series of phenomena 
— ecstacy, vision, prophecy, healings, and such deal- 
ing with the natural world as we call miraculous — 
which must either be rejected, as we ordinarily do 
reject them, as unthinkable upon our assumed 
premises, or accepted as the evidence of a power- 
ful spiritual activity exerted through the lives of 
certain men and women. We accept the presence 
and action of this spiritual power in persons whose 
lives are recorded in Holy Scripture — and most of 
us stop there, with the question begging assertion 
that such action is ''miraculous." But why stop 
there? The phenomena do not stop there, but are 
continuous in Christian history. They are phen- 
omena that are constantly attendant upon the life 
of sanctity. I do not mean that every alleged mi- 
racle in the "lives of the Saints" is to be accepted 



I AM THE VINE 211 

without question ; but I do mean that there is quite 
sufficient evidence in the lives of the saints of the 
operation of a power which we have, speaking 
broadly, declined carefully to consider and to ap- 
preciate which does not differ, so far as one can see, 
from the power exercised by St. Peter, St. Paul or 
St. John, which we admit. To me, there seems 
every reason to believe that the spiritual nature of 
man, purified and intensified by its union with the 
life of God in Christ, is constanly capable of deal- 
ing with the world in the way of a force, and pro- 
ducing effects which are as real as those produced 
by material forces. When we meet with such 
phenomena in the lives of the saints there is need, 
no doubt, to criticise and control them : but it cannot 
be admitted that they are a priori impossible, after 
the manner of the old scepticism, or that they are to 
be explained of a morbid mind, as it is at present 
fashionable to do. We admit unhesitatingly the in- 
fluence of personality: we must widen our concep- 
tion to include spiritual personality — personality 
which has become, through the life of union, the 
organ of the Divine Spirit, not through superseding 
or obliteration of our powers, but by the heightening 
and intensifying of them. Through such use of the 
human by the divine a new order of causation en- 
ters the world and the supernatural is naturalized. 
We may state one result of our incorporation 



2 I 2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

in the Vine and of your purging that we may bring 
forth fruit, as an increase of privileges. Those 
who have entered upon the exercise of the Chris- 
tian life as a life of union with their Saviour, find 
the fulfillment of his promises a constant fact of 
their experience — find this, because they have learn- 
ed to accept and act upon his promises as they 
would upon the promises of any friend in whom 
they trusted. Our Lord's promises are intended 
to be the support and guidance of the daily life of 
the Christian; but they are so splendid and far- 
reaching that we are afraid of them and do not 
trust ourselves to them. I am sure that it cannot 
be said that the Christian community bases its life 
squarely upon them : Rather,it attempts to fall back 
upon them spasmodically and in cases of difficulty. 
But they are not meant to be places of refuge amid 
the crowded streets of life, but are the very street 
itself. "Ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be 
done unto you." is a very sweeping promise, and is 
to be taken only with such limitations as are in- 
volved in the application of any principle to life. 
The things that will be impossible to us will be 
those that are rendered so by the imperfection of 
our union with Christ. Union, I must again insist, 
is the foundation of our Lord's action in us, and is 
the indispensable preliminary to his action. How 
far we have become one with him is the measure of 



I AM THE VINE 313 

how far he can act in us. I do not mean that a 
man living in a state of sin and alienation from the 
life of God may not call upon God, and, repudiat- 
ing his sin, hope for an answer to his cry ; but that 
a man living in unrepudiated sin has no basis of 
hope. He must first of all repent and come to God. 
I do not mean that those whose union with our 
Lord is but partial and imperfect owing to the 
branch not yet having been thoroughly purged, are 
not heard of God; but that in their case the purg- 
ing is the pressing matter, and that they must care 
for that before there is a possibility of gaining 
much of the "other things" — "seek ye first the king- 
dom of God and his righteousness and all these 
things shall be added unto you." There is, no 
doubt, a certain necessary order in the distribution 
of the divine gifts. 

One feels sure that prayers so often fail because 
they are the occasional resort to God for gifts on 
the part of those who have never cared enough 
about God to maintain any intimacy of life with 
him : who resort to him in emergencies, as they 
might to a stranger or neglected friend. Even 
such prayers should no doubt be made; and we 
may expect much from the All-Father who "giveth 
to all men liberally," and "maketh his sun to rise 
on the evil and on the good, and sendeth his rain 
upon the just and the unjust," but they lack the 



214 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

assured basis of Christian promise. The prayers 
that are made by Christians on the basis of our 
Lord's promises are of another order. They, too, 
may often seem unanswered ; but the reason of this 
seeming lack of answer must be sought elsewhere. 
I think that we may be sure of this, if we are liv- 
ing lives close to our Lord, that the prayers that are 
not answered are the prayers which we should not 
want answered, if we could see the whole fact. 
The failures are failures that we shall rejoice 
in when we come to see the whole fact 
of life. There is no one with any deep 
experience of prayer who cannot look back 
and see that not once or twice, the love of 
God was manifest in the denial rather than in the 
granting our requests. God acted upon what was 
best for our lives at the time, not upon our 
imperfect vision of the best. There is a 
passage in the Sermon on the Mount that 
seems to everybody the principle of God's 
dealing with us in this matter. Our Lord 
is there teaching about prayer and lays down as 
the basis of our confidence this promise: "Every- 
one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh 
findeth ; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened". 
He develops, as the ground of this promise, the 
Fatherhood of God; and then goes on to illustrate 
from the phenomena of human fatherhood. "What 



I AM THE VINE 21$ 

man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread will 
he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish will he 
give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know 
how to give good gifts to your children, how much 
more will your Father which is in heaven give good 
things to them that ask him?" And surely if the 
son ask a stone or serpent, thinking it, in his ignor- 
ance, bread or fish, the human father will decline 
the mistaken request. He would not give evil gifts or 
hurtful because of the son's ignorance. And no more 
shall our Father which is heaven. He will re- 
gard the nature of our asking and the need of our 
life. He will be content in his giving to bear the 
reproaches of our ignorance, our fretful complaint 
that he is not faithful, the irritation of our disap- 
pointment. God is content to be misunderstood, 
and always will be misunderstood except by those 
who have the vision of faith, by those who have 
lived with God and trusted him and have found 
him faithful — as faithful in what he refused as in 
what he gave. They have learned to make it their 
first and abiding prayer that they may desire noth- 
ing but that which is according to his will, and 
that his will and his wisdom may ever check and 
override their own ignorance and limited vision. 
Approaching God with this mind they approach 
him in the strength of his promise: "what things 
soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye re- 



S 1 6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ceive them, and ye shall receive them." "Ye shall 
receive them," for it is impossible for him who 
lives in union with God, to desire anything other 
than the will of God. The ultimate prayer of all 
Christians, conditioning any other prayer, is this: 
"Thy will be done." 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 
I Am the Light of the World. 



B 



Let us picture — 

LIND Bartimaeus, sitting by the way-side, 
begging. Our Lord, passing out of Jeri- 
cho, with his disciples, is accompanied by 
a curious crowd, inspired by the hope, no doubt, of 
seeing some new miracles done by him. But 
though this hope was in their mind they over- 
looked the opportunity that the blind beggar was to 
our Lord. He would seem to have been a fami- 
liar figure, and suggested nothing to them. Yet 
here was a man in whose soul a great need had 
given birth to a great faith. Many had told him 
of Jesus of Nazareth and his wonderful works; 
and it was in his soul that if he could only get to 
817 



a l 8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

speak with him, he, too, might experience his 
power. Hence the tumult of the passing crowd, 
and the information flung to him, that Jesus was 
going by, led him to cry out with a cry that would 
not be stilled by the protests of the multitude, but 
gained in intensity as he realized that his one hope 
of healing lay in attracting the attention of the 
passing Teacher and Prophet — "Jesus, thou Son 
of David, have mercy on me." Imagine the ter- 
ror of his soul least the sound of voices growing 
faint and of footsteps dying in the distance should 
tell him that his cry had been in vain, and then 
— how natural is that touch — the voices change; 
they are no longer protests against his crying, but 
words of encougagement : "Be of good com- 
fort, rise: he calleth thee." And then the voice of 
Jesus, asking his need, and the words that bring 
healings : — "Go thy way ; thy faith hath made thee 
whole." So the light becomes the symbol of another 
Light, we may be sure, that was to fill his soul till 
life ended — and beyond. 

Consider, first — 

The poverty of humanity without Christ. We 
make a brave show of our skill, our learning, our 
enlightenment; but without Christ it is but the 
skill of ants and of apes, a curious thing but issue- 
less, destined to perish with a perishing world. We 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 2?9 

sit by the way-side of life, begging — begging for 
some knowledge of our destiny, begging for some 
ray of light to pierce the clouds that close about 
the sun's setting. And our sciences and our philo- 
sophies have nothing to say to our pleading, if not 
that it is the foolish pleading of a child. They charge 
us that we should hold our peace. But humanity 
cannot and will not do that. It continues to cry in 
the hope that its voice may reach some ear more sym- 
pathetic, will kindle the pity of some Unknown 
who will be touched by its extreme need, and pause 
and call it to come to him. To me there is noth- 
ing so pathetic as the ceaseless struggles of human- 
ity to solve the riddle of its life, and its refusal to 
be satisfied with the answers that its teachers bring 
it from generation to generation. The history of 
human thought shows that there is an instinct in 
man that is stronger than all his reasoning, that 
declines the conclusions that seem to be forced up- 
on it by that reasoning, and insists on turning 
hopefully to the ever-new passers on life's path- 
way, and crying out its needs to them and begging 
them to stop and listen. Have mercy on 
me, it has cried continually; and listened to 
all voices that promised any help. Those 
who claimed a monopoly of the learning of 
the world might speak derisively of its supersti- 
tions, but humanity has always preferred its super- 



3 20 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

stitions of a God and a future life, to the rational 
certainties and proofs of its teachers. It has been 
certain that at some time a voice would break 
through its darkness, and say, "Go thy way: thy 
faith has made thee whole." 

Consider, second — 

That a day came when the voice sounded — the 
voice so long awaited — and the darkness broke and 
man could know; could know that he was only 
passingly a creature of this world, and that he is 
the immortal creature of God. Jesus came, and 
walked along human streets, and went out of the 
gates of cities where blind beggars sit and cry, and 
listened to their voices and spoke words of hope. "J 
am the light of the world/' he said to those who 
sat in darkness; and their eyes were opened and 
they saw him. He, the Word of God, swept the 
gathering clouds from the sunset sky, and men saw 
their sun go down in serenity and peace, because 
they now knew that it would rise again. We no 
longer look out on the world as a world torn by 
useless struggles and wet with purposeless blood, 
but we see the world illumined with a teaching 
that is from God, and we see it through the crim- 
son of a blood that was shed to take away its sin. 
The ears of the deaf are unstopped, and they hear 
words of comfort and encouragement and 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 22 f 

guidance; the eyes of the blind are opened, 
and they see Jesus of Nazareth who stands 
and calls them. We are no longer children 
of the darkness, but of the light. God has 
commanded the light to shine out of darkness, 
and it hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of 
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But let 
us not forget the darkness; let us not be as those 
who never having been blind, hear with but faint 
interest the affliction of the sightless. Let us 
rather remember, that we have passed from dark- 
ness into light, and that the passage back is a pos- 
sible one. It is yet possible that the Light of the 
World may die out of our world, and the light 
within us become darkness. "If therefore the 
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that 
darkness." 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may walk in the light as the children of 
light. Let us pray that we may be lightened more 
and more unto the perfect day. 

O God, the Enlightener of all nations, grant thy 
people to enjoy perpetual peace; and pour into 
our hearts that Radiant Light which thou didst 
shed into the minds of the Wise Men; through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

We beseech the, O Lord, to enlighten they peo- 



22 2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

pie, and alway set their hearts on fire with the 
brightness of thy glory ; that they may both unceas- 
ingly acknowledge their Saviour, and truly appre- 
hend their Lord who with thee and the Holy Ghost, 
liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. 

Life apart from God is unintelligible; it is the 
coming of the Spirit into life that unlocks its se- 
crets. Christ is the known quantity which enter- 
ing among the unknown quantities of life deter- 
mines their values. He has enriched life every- 
where that he has touched it; and far beyond the 
values which religion has obviously created there 
are other values which owe their existence to its 
unnoted influences. Yet the influence of our Lord 
has penetrated life and so entangled itself with the 
influences which come from other sources, that it 
is always possible to deny his influence if we will to. 
The social evidence for the influence of Christian- 
ity is strangely like the intellectual evidence for 
the beliefs of Christianity — there is always a loop- 
hole of escape if you do not want to believe. The 
evidence for faith never reaches the force of a 
demonstration, otherwise faith would cease. The 
appeal of the evidence will call forth response in 
''men of good will," not in others. We see this 
when we read those books which are from time to 
time written to show the gain to human society 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 9 2$ 

through the Gospel. Page after page piles up illus- 
trations of the thesis from philosophy, education, 
legislation, etc. It seems a luminous demonstra- 
tion; and then we take up some volume written 
from the opposite point of view and watch the pro- 
cess whereby the force of the evidence is chipped 
away. We read of vast monuments whereon an- 
cient kings have recorded their exploits in inscrip- 
tions which they believed would be imperish- 
able; but ere many generations had passed some 
king of their successors had effaced their name and 
boldly written in his own. It is thus that the in- 
fluence of Christianity has been dealt with: the 
records which bore our Lord's name have been de- 
faced, and the name of some other written in. Now 
and again there arises some man bold enough to 
attempt to erase the name of Christ from history 
and to deny that he lived or founded the religion 
that is called after him. It is not very new or 
very important: it is an old story that we believe 
what we want to believe and see what we want to 
see. No doubt the landscape has a different ap- 
pearance according as you stand on your feet or on 
your head. The universe is so big that you can 
assemble facts which will lend some color of sup- 
port to almost any theory. You can "prove" that 
the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round 



224 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

the earth by selecting some facts and excluding 
others. 

We look out upon the world from the point of 
view of those who have accepted Christianity, and 
our impression of the human landscape is there- 
fore different from that gathered by those who start 
with the rejection of Christ and supernatural relig- 
ion. Faith ascribes one set of values to the un- 
known quantity in the equation of life and unfaith 
another. We need to remember this when we are 
inclined to accept rationalistic interpretations of 
life up to a certain point, hoping thus to effect a 
reconciliation between faith and unbelief by im- 
posing our conclusions upon the other man's prem- 
ises. The divergence between rationalism and 
Christianity is in the premises. We cannot adopt 
a mechanical theory of the universe and then in 
the end insert somewhere in the niches of it a beHef 
in prayer and free will. We cannot start from the 
premises of pantheism and hope to be able to hold 
a belief in responsible personality when we get 
through. It is no doubt true that there can be no 
real conflict between science and philosophy and 
religion ; but it is only true of an ideal science and 
philosophy and religion. As these actually exist 
they are all intermixed with error and constantly 
run athwart one another's course. Ideally, there 
could be no divergence in the testimony of three 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 225 

men who had been witnesses of the same event, but 
we know that no three men witnessing the 
same event will give precisely the same testi- 
mony. Science and philosophy and religion 
proceed from distinct groups of data and 
are deduced from the data by fallible men. Until 
we can eliminate the factor of fallibility we must 
expect that there will be more or less divergence 
in the conclusion. And while it is desirable that 
we constantly submit our conclusions to the criti- 
cism of others, it is not necessary to be very much 
disturbed when we find that the criticism is not 
always favorable. Faith, after all, is an ulti- 
mate for each of us, and is based on our 
own experience of life in the broad sense 
that all the facts are embraced in and proven by 
living. The Christian's certainty rests on this, 
that his experience embraces more facts than the 
experience of any other ; and among these facts that 
alter the character of the universe from what it is 
from the standpoint of any other experience. The 
Christian's contention is that the supernatural, that 
is, God in action, is not an hypothesis, like the 
other of the scientists and the absolute of the philo- 
sopher, but an experienced fact. Such being his 
premise his view of the universe will necessarily 
differ from that of those who deny God or accept 
him as a doubtful hypothesis. That science and 
(16) 



*26 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

philosophy do not lend much support to religion is 
no surprise or shock to the Christian because he 
knows that they omit what to him is the most vital 
element in the problems they deal with. 

And yet we have no quarrel with either while it 
keeps to its own ground. With science in particu- 
lar there should be no "warfare.'' The first sup- 
position of the scientist is that the world is intelli- 
gible. To speak accurately, this is not a scientific 
datum but an hypothesis of faith. The investiga- 
tor of natural phenomena must make an act of 
faith as the preliminary condition to setting to work 
at all. If he had no faith in the intelligibility of 
the world, he could have no hope of reaching intel- 
ligible conclusions in investigating it. So far 
science and religion are agreed that they both rest 
on an act of faith. The scientist works in faith, 
seeking to observe and map out the modes of oper- 
ation of the natural world. When he succeeds in 
rinding uniform modes of action he summarizes 
them as "laws," that is, observed sequences. There 
are, so great is the number of the facts he has to 
deal with, and so complex, lacunae in his mass of 
observations, that he cannot fill, stretches of un- 
known territory that he cannot traverse. But 
these do not disturb him: because of his primary 
act of faith in the intelligibility of the universe as 
a w hole, he is able to make subsidiary acts of faith ; 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 227 

that the lacunae are not breaks in the order of 
nature, but gaps in his knowledge. These will, 
perhaps, one day be rilled up by observed facts; 
in the meantime they can be bridged by an hy- 
pothesis. They are like breaks in an inscription 
where some letter has been worn away or effaced. 
It is not mere guess work to assume that there 
have been letters there; and from the letters that 
go before and follow, the vacant space can be 
filled with more or less probability. The condition 
is that the restored letters shall make sense. So 
the lacunae in the natural order may be rationally 
filled in by suppositions that will join the two sides 
of the break and "make sense." This, however, we 
must insist rests on an act of faith in the intelligi- 
bility of the system as a whole. 

The attitude of the Christian toward the world 
is essentially the same. His first supposition is that 
the world is not only physically intelligible but that 
it is morally and spiritually intelligible. His faith 
embraces the faith of the scientist and goes beyond 
it. The scientist cannot get beyond matter and 
force. Where these end he can only look off the 
edge of the universe and say, "I see nothing beyond. 
There is no physical hypothesis that will lighten 
the darkness and take me further. ,, But the Chris- 
tian has a further hypothesis — the hypothesis of 
faith. He believes in God, that the universe is the 



2 28 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

work of a Spiritual Intelligence. He meets, as 
does the scientist, in the physical order, lacunae 
that he cannot fill, dark places that he cannot light ; 
but he is no more disturbed by them than the scien- 
tist by the lacunae which lie in the natural order. 
He believes that the will and operation of God are 
continuous across the lacunae, though for the 
present he cannot see how. But because of his 
primary hypothesis, that the universe is a system 
intelligible, spiritually and morally, he goes on un- 
disturbed. Seeming contradictions do not terrify 
him, problems of pain and sin, apparent limitations 
of God's power of goodness, do not disturb him. 
All these to him are but evidences of the vastness 
of the universe, and of his own limitations. 

And the faith of the Christian is fortified by the 
coming of Christ into life. It was my lot once to 
live where my windows looked out to the West: 
they opened upon a little lake, a lake that was a 
living thing, changing its expression with each hour 
of the day — an opal set in a frame of green. Across 
the lake a wooded bank rose from the water. In 
the early morning as the light that heralds the sun- 
rise came, the beauty of the lake and of the bank 
was new each moment. One could not see the sky 
where the sun was coming in the glory of the dawn- 
tints, or the flocks of clouds that ushered in the 
day. But the light, as it touched the Western bank, 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 229 

changed what had a moment before been a uniform 
stretch of dull, nameless color, into the endless 
variety of a living wood. Each tree and bush 
started out in all its individuality; there was the 
yellow of young willows, the silver-green of the 
poplar, the emerald of the maple, the mauve and 
pink of young oak buds. Where one had dis- 
tinguished only shadows moving in the darkness 
there was all the variety of throbbing light — the 
l.'ght had come and revealed and glorified it. 

So is the coming of our Lord into human life: 
he comes as light : he brings out its meaning and its 
value, meaning and value that has been there all 
the time, only we were unable to see them. . His 
presence flashes light into the dark places, and the 
perplexity and trouble of them pass away. He jus- 
tifies the ways of God to man, and makes us 
ashamed of our doubt and terror. He braces our 
faith and confirms our hypothesis that this world is 
God's world and is being led by him with the iner- 
rancy of infinite wisdom. For unnumbered genera- 
tions men had walked in darkness. They had ap- 
pealed in vain to their accredited teachers, their 
philosophers and scientists, for light and help. But 
they had been fed with a mass of unintelligible and 
contradictory speculations. To maintain any hope 
at all they had been compelled to disregard their 
teachers and turn from them to the indestructible 



2 3° THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

instinct that they found in their own souls — the 
instinct that told them that whatever might be the 
depressing appearances of the world, or the con- 
tradictory voices of men, this is God's world and 
ruled by the wisdom of God. This unfailing in- 
stinct of God sustained men; and this was justified 
in the coming of Christ. He is the Light that dis- 
sipates the world's darkness; and if there are 
dark places still, if all the questions we can ask 
have not yet found answers, if they are lacunae in 
our knowledge, still there is abundant basis for our 
faith and confident hope that the Providence of 
God which is so far intelligible will that day be 
justified when the full facts are revealed. God in 
Christ, as an explanation of the universe, "makes 
sense". 

Because we are very sure of that, we are opti- 
mists — it is not the least of the boons of Chris- 
tianity that it enables men to be optimistic. We are 
just emerging (at least the signs point that way) 
from a long period of pessimism. The wail of the 
minor poet has long been heard in the land. The 
men who have made the literature of the world in 
the last half century have preached to us of the 
triviality and inconsequence of life. Much of the 
humor of the world has turned sour. When pro- 
test has been raised, the answer has been that it is 
the duty of literature to mirror life — an indisput- 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 23 1 

able proposition. "We are going to tell the whole 
truth about life and nothing shall stop us", is the 
substance of one of the latest literary protests in 
the interest of freedom. The meaning is, it would 
seem, we will speak as plainly as we like on ques- 
tions of sex. I do not know that there is any ob- 
jection to so doing. In fact, I doubt if anyone has 
been much impressed with the prevalence of a dis- 
cipline, arcana in such matters in the writers of the 
last half century. Such speaking may be some of 
the truth about life, but it is certainly not all of it. 
There are some of us who pass a reasonable amount 
of our time thinking about other things, and do 
not find ourselves deprived of subjects of conversa- 
tion where the problem of the sexes is. excluded. 
We can, at times, permit ourselves to doubt whether 
the quality of literature is, in fact, improving under 
the new discipline. Nor is it true that "life" means 
slum life, or criminal life, or any other fraction of 
human living. Life is a big thing of mingled lights 
and shadows, and it is not adequately treated when 
represented as all shadow. The daily paper, we are 
told, is a mirror of contemporary life ; but any one 
who will think for five minutes on the matter will 
see that it is not. A newspaper man explained to 
me the other day that the news value of an occur- 
rence was in proportion to the shock it would pro- 
duce. That accounts for the fact that the death 



23* THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of some really great man will call forth a dozen 
lines of obituary, while a column will be devoted 
to the luxurious dog-house that has been erected 
by some foolish woman for her pets. News repre- 
sents an appeal to the curiosity or passing interest 
of readers; it does not, and in the nature of the 
case, cannot, appeal solely to the interests that 
are deep and permanent. One dots not object to 
the newspaper, but only to the pretension that it 
is a chronicle of life. Base-ball has not that im- 
portance in human life that an observer from another 
planet might infer that it had if he relied on the 
newspaper for his evidence or limited his observa- 
tion to the streets of New York during some "final 
series". By far the greater part of human inter- 
ests, and the deeper and more valuable part, do not 
make good copy, or afford the appropriate themes 
for commercialized fiction and drama. 

My point is that pessimistic views of life are the 
results of a narrow observation and are rendered 
easy by those who portray life in terms of "shock'', 
and find the greater part of life dull colorless and 
uninteresting. If it be true that humanity is not 
made up of Tvanhoes and Colonel Newcomes; it 
is also true that it is not made up of Ann Veronicas 
and Senhouses. The interests of life are not 
necessarily dramatic or spectacular. There are 
pleasures and deep joys, heart-searching experi- 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 233 

ences, situations that call out all that is best and 
noblest in man, which mean much in the moulding 
of character, but are valueless as documents of 
publicity. Yet if we are to get at a true estimate 
of the meaning of life these must enter our account. 
There are possibilities of life for all of us which we 
too often overlook and miss, which would raise 
our lives to higher levels and confer experiences 
that would make pessimism impossible for us. But 
we are fascinated by the box of life and pour out 
the jewels. How many are there who actually 
make the effort to find a meaning and purpose in 
life? Is it not true that the majority treat life as 
a meaningless succession of unrelated days and 
years, as days and years bound together by a merely 
temporary purpose? Events, in such a life, be- 
cause they are accepted as isolated occurrences and 
no effort is made to see them related to the whole, 
may well seem meaningless. Even the most import- 
ant event if so taken, is meaningless. How meaning- 
less is the birth of a child who lives but a few weeks ! 
But through the brief life of the child an intense 
experience has come to the parents, an experience 
which leaves an abiding mark. Can either of them 
be just what they were before? Has there not been 
some revelation through the child that abides in 
life? Are not death and the other world seen with 
an added shade of meaning? Does not heaven 



234 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

mean more to them because of a treasure laid up 
there ? Life may be darkened and clouded by death 
or it may be enriched and deepened. That is as we 
use the fact. It gives the opportunity for the dis- 
play of what is in us — pessimism and optimism. 

Our reactions from life are determined, no doubt, 
by processes within ourselves which have been long 
going on, it may be, unnoticed. You stand by the 
artist and watch him mix his colors on the palette, 
and the result of his deft manipulation is some 
glorious color that fascinates you as it is spread 
upon the canvas. Why, you ask, that tiny touch of 
yellow? All the painter can say is that he knew 
that it was needed. He has come to the knowledge 
by long experience. His color has gained an in- 
dividuality as the outcome of his life-work. You 
and I react in a perfectly individual way from the 
same facts of life, because we each experience life 
differently. Of course we get no meanings if we are 
not looking for them; but whatever meaning we 
do get are meanings that we can get because of our 
past. We cannot gather the spiritual meanings 
with which even common events are big, unless 
we have accustomed ourselves to look upon life as 
fundamentally spiritual, and taught ourselves to 
look for the spiritual possibilities of events. 

It is the revelation that comes to us from our 
Blessed Lord, that life is a sacred thing, the gift of 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 235 

•God, that unveils its significance. That revelation 
has a double effect. It shows us the possibility of 
awful disaster that is near every life — the possi- 
bility of destroying a thing of infinite value. Life 
gets its value from God, it is a creature of God, a 
mode of his self-manifestation. One never looks 
on at the process of the destruction of spiritual 
values that goes on all the time under our very 
eyes without heart-ache. The streets of a city ap- 
pear as battlefields strewn with corpses. Here are 
all the instruments of an infernal warfare. Here 
is human ingenuity tasked to the uttermost in the 
hellish work of destroying souls. Walk about 
Times Square at night, and if you have a mind 
that can see, you will walk with heavy heart and 
eyes filled with tears. This, you will feel, is where 
Satan's seat is ; where the net of excitement is cast 
for willing victims. Night after night this vulgar 
blaze of light looks down on souls swept to spirit- 
ual death by the fascination of crude sensation. 
If the lights could but illuminate the inner man! 
That boy there has stolen that he may see the picture 
show. That girl has cast aside the advice of friends 
and disobeyed her parents that she may ''enjoy" 
herself tonight. That scarcely more than boy who 
is going into the saloon, already has eyes red with 
wine. Covetousness, anger, adultery — all the mor- 
tal sins walk at large here under the eyes of the 



*3 6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

police, the representatives of a society which is un- 
able to govern itself. Can you see the souls sicken- 
ing and dying — dying brutally, riotously, gaudily? 
And what is your personal relation to the sight? 
Is it pessimism, that accepts it as the necessary 
outcome of an advanced civilization? Is it cynicism 
that goes its way with contemptuous amusement at 
-the vileness and stupidity of the human animal? 
Is it indifference which accepts it without thought 
as what has been and will be? Or does it seem to 
you a pitiable and useless waste which an effective 
action upon what this community as a .whole be- 
lieves would soon bring to an end? For, after all, 
this community does not believe that the seven 
deadly sins are the proper expression of human ac- 
tivity. It does not believe in the right of passion 
to gratification, or in the right of covetousness to 
exploit the weak and ignorant. It does not believe 
in the right of unscrupulous men to make boys 
drunkards and girls harlots, to fill hospitals and 
almshouses with the degraded wrecks of men and 
women. No! the revelation of God in Christ has 
made it impossible that any community should be- 
lieve that. The Light that lightens the world has 
made that clear. But the Light is not being trans- 
mitted into heat — the heat of zeal that will drive 
men to live by their beliefs. Men do not live by 
their beliefs, but remain observers, critics, drifters,. 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 237 

waiters upon others' actions, hoping that someone 
will act, but inactive themselves. 

But the revelation not only shows us the disaster 
consequent upon this disregard of spiritual values: 
it shows us the power that is inherent in the spirit- 
ual life. It is but a few steps from the spiritual 
agony of Times Square to where St. Mary's stands 
with the figure of the Crucified lifted above its 
door. It is but a step from a life that believes and 
looks on in inaction, to a life that believes with a 
belief that is dynamic. It is but a step! But that 
step involves an experience of the Cross. "I am ihe 
light of the world!" But the Light that Jesus is, 
reveals, first of all, that he is crucified. The light 
that streams into the world streams from a Cross; 
and as it passes into our lives and energizes them 
it becomes in them the power of sacrifice — the power 
of those who have been crucified with Christ and 
are risen in him. When we are so united to our 
Lord that his experience is ours we shall learn the 
power of spiritual motive and the energy of spirit- 
ual principle. The spiritual life is not a theory that 
can be learned, but an energetic action which is 
known in experiencing it. And when we have ex- 
perienced it we can no longer look on in hopeless- 
ness at the ills of the world; hoping, at most, that 
God will heal them : but we shall know that he has 
redeemed us and made us one with himself, to the 



8$8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

end that through us his work may go on. The 
word now is: "ye are the light of the world", and 
"let your light so shine before men that they may 
see your good works and glorify your Father which 
is in heaven." It is through us that the world- 
darkness must be dissipated. 

The first step in this world-illuminating process 
is to focus the light upon our own lives. They 
must be thoroughly illuminated before we can trans- 
mit light. Many an attempt to transmit light comes 
to a premature end because the light within is 
darkness. First of all we need to bring to bear the 
revelation that is in Christ upon the facts of our 
own lives. Your life needs that illumination; it 
needs to see its obligations of self-perfecting in 
thought and motive, its possibility of development 
in spiritual power, in intensity of spiritual purpose. 
We have a standard in the human action of Jesus, 
and we must constantly recur to that. It is our 
shiftless tendency to measure ourselves by some 
other standard. We need to educate ourselves 
spiritually. 

And notwithstanding that there is nothing more 
important than our spiritual education, there is no 
phrase more meaningless than spiritual education 
as applied to the average American Christian. 
Education implies systematic effort to call out and 
train immature powers. It implies intelligence di- 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 239 

rected to carefully considered ends; intelligence 
which shows itself, among other things, in choice 
of means appropriate to the end. Of how many 
men and women can it be said that their spiritual 
state today is the outcome of a well-considered 
and carefully followed-up system of spiritual edu- 
cation? Yet the powers of the spiritual nature 
have ends as important and are as capable of ef- 
fective training for those ends as the natural powers. 
But whatever spiritual habits we have are very 
much the result of accident. We have picked up 
in the course of our wanderings on this planet cer- 
tain scraps of spiritual information which most 
likely have never been related in our experience. 
We have acquired certain religious customs, such 
as saying our prayers and going to church; we 
have accumulated some forms of action which we 
should describe as our morals, but which, in fact, 
are imitations of other people's conduct, conformity 
to the fashion of life which prevails in the circle 
in which we move. The evidence of this is ready 
at hand. We do not have to take cases so extreme 
as that of the woman who stated that she came 
to the church from the Methodists because the 
Methodists forbade card-playing and she liked to 
play cards. And then added — perhaps because of 
some expression on the face of her visitor — "The 
Episcopal Church does believe in playing cards, 



24° THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

doesn't it?'' A priest is being continually asked 
questions of a most elementary kind, questions that 
imply an abysmal ignorance of the commonplaces 
of the spiritual life — not by people who are un- 
lettered, or have passed their life in unbelief, but 
by people who all their lives have been faithful 
members of the church. The crass ignorance of 
the average Christian concerning the Christian re- 
ligion is inconceivable. 

Why do not the clergy teach? Without discus- 
sing the capacity of the clergy to teach, which is 
not always what we could desire — the clergy cannot 
teach people who will not come to be taught. The 
clergy have no power to compel even the children, 
not to say the men and women, of their congrega- 
tions, to come to classes. And people who are 
quite able to find time for the theatre, for clubs, 
for card parties, are unable to find time for religious 
instruction. It is impossible to keep children under 
religious instruction because their parents are ut- 
terly indifferent in the matter of their religious 
training. Adults are not to be gathered because 
— well, they have an infinite number of excuses 
which nobody believes, least of all themselves. The 
real fact is that they are not interested, and will 
not go where they are not amused. Religious in- 
struction cannot claim to be amusing. The only 
thing one effects by instruction classes is to gather 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 241 

that element of a parish which least needs instruc- 
tion, and which comes out of a feeling of loyalty. 
The result is a community to which it is almost im- 
possible to speak of the deeper things of the spirit- 
ual life, and which must be entertained with snip- 
pets of religious teaching carefully sugar-coated to 
avoid even these being found unpalatable. 

There are, of course, other possible sources of 
spiritual training. There is reading, for example, 
But go into the average Christian household and 
look about for the religious literature they read. 
Will you find even a Bible in a state of active use? 
If it is a family containing religious members you 
will find one or two devotional books, possibly; 
not much used, and of small profit if they were. I 
suppose we have long ago given up the supersti- 
tion that universal education is going to produce a 
community of earnest seekers after knowledge of 
any kind. People read newspapers and magazines 
and popular fiction — and there it stops : I tried to 
converse the other day with a wealthy woman who 
divides her time between Europe and America and 
who is extremely active and liberal in promoting 
a certain kind of good works, and I could not find 
that she ever read anything at all. Most people 
who are not wealthy seem to consider the buying of 
a book an absurd waste of money. If you recom- 
(17) 



142 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

mend a book and they can borrow it they will per- 
haps look into it. 

These things being so, how can we hope for the 
spread of religion in any useful meaning of the 
word ? Can people who do not give time to spirit- 
ual discipline ever become spiritual? In the present 
stage of the evolution of the spiritual man it looks 
as though we might continue to be content with a 
small minority of spiritually intelligent people, and 
do what we can to educate others. 

What, then, do we mean by spiritual training? 
Canon Simpson puts the matter admirably: "The 
instruction of the Christian is not the conveyance 
to the intellect of a series of propositions concerning 
the being of God, but the education of his spirit in 
the art of detecting the presence of God in practical 
contact with the facts of life. It is the transmis- 
sion oi a key, and no man can be called a Chris- 
tian indeed so long as he keeps it in his pocket. He 
must for himself fit it into the lock, and find that it 
opens the door. That is the significance of the 
key." And Christ is the key of life. Our personal 
religion begins by being an experience of God in 
"hrist. It is a mistake to begin religious training 
anywhere else: to begin, for instance, with natural 
knowledge, and attempt to build up to spiritual 
knowledge through that. It is not true that the 
experience of God is very difficult, and only to be 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 243 

looked for at the end of religious training. The 
child is quite capable of a true experience of God. 
He quite naturally believes in our Lord and finds 
him present in his life. What we are not to look 
for in the child is a religious theory. Consequently, 
I utterly dissent from most of the modern teaching 
about the religious training of children. It is 
founded on a bad psychology. It recommends that 
the child shall not be taught religion in its earliest 
years because it will inevitably form wrong ideas 
which will embarrass it at a later stage of its de- 
velopment. But at what stage of human develop- 
ment are we certain not to form wrong notions of 
God? At any stage of our development our notions 
of God are erroneous, that is, inadequate. They do 
not, and cannot, grasp the whole fact of God : the 
point is that they are adequate to our needs in the 
state of development in which we find ourselves. 
You gain nothing, therefore, by putting off the 
age of religious instruction till fourteen or more. 
The child at six can form a notion of God on which 
he can usefully act, and can form a habit of act- 
ing in response to spiritual motive, which in value 
outweighs the fact that he will have later to cor- 
rect his thought of God. It is the habit of acting 
that is of the first importance. That the child's 
prayers are sometimes very extraordinary in their 
contents is of no importance at all. That he is 



244 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

learning to rely on his heavenly Father in all the 
c ncerns of his life is all important. His thought 
of God will mature as the years go on; but if his 
mind is kept a blank until some indefinite period 
when his teacher thinks his thought of God will 
not be altogether unworthy, it is doubtful if you 
have done more than to deprive him of some years 
of experience with no counterbalancing gain. 

The creation of experience is what spiritual 
training aims at, and that can hardly be injected 
ready made. It has to grow. It can be guided in 
its growth, it can be given material to feed upon. 
Religious instruction gives the material. The ob- 
ject of the creed is to guide religious experience. 
As religious experience is experience of God in 
Christ, it has in all cases a normal course of pro- 
cedure, a typical form. The creed is this, because 
the creed is the formulation of normal Christian 
experience. The creed is not truth thought out in 
vacuo; but the truths of the creed came into the 
world through Christian experience, and then lan- 
guage was sought to clothe and make intelligible the 
experience. The struggle in the Church in creed 
development, was a struggle, not to discover some- 
thing, but to express something. The only thing 
at any time new about the creed was the words 
that conveyed the experience. Therefore the pro- 
cess of spiritual training is the process of exper- 



I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 245 

iencing the creed — of passing for oneself through 
the normal Christian experience which is registered 
there. If we cannot find the creed true, it is be- 
cause we have not succeeded in experiencing God 
in Christ as the Church from the beginning has. 
If we have had God as the creating and ruling 
power in our lives, if we have found our Lord 
to be our Saviour, if we are lifted up to dwell with 
him in heavenly places, if the Holy Spirit is bring- 
ing forth its fruits in our lives, if we are in constant 
touch with God in the Sacraments — then we are 
expressing just what the creed states to be the 
truth. 

This expression, of course, cannot be built up 
without close attention to our spiritual activity. 
The spiritual powers must be constantly exercised. 
That practice of religion that consists in the per- 
formance of occasional acts is certainly not ade- 
quate to an experience which shall embrace and 
transfigure the whole life. We are seeking to be- 
come, not men and women of the world who con- 
form to the law of God, but new creatures in Christ 
Jesus who reflect his mind. A legal righteousness 
may be a very fair imitation of the righteousness; 
that "exceeds;" but is only an imitation. You 
hold in your hand a diamond, as you think, and 
you are satisfied" with it; but take it to the jewelers 
and throw it into a tray of real diamonds and you 



*46 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

will see the difference. We read, not long ago, ol 
a woman whose string of pearls had been the envy 
of the world in which she moved; but she died, 
and when her property was appraised, many of the 
pearls were confessed imitations. Can we carry 
that temper of mind into our religion? Surely 
there, at any rate, the grace of sincerity is of all 
worth. There we want the pearl of great price, 
a spiritual life flooded with the Light that is Christ. 
We want the light to penetrate to the very darkest 
and most dusty corners of our soul, and reveal their 
need of cleansing. 

Christ is the true Light that, coming into the 
world, lighteneth every man. In his light we see 
light; and our only aspiration is to be obedient to 
the guiding of the light. That light is shed forth 
into our souls abundantly ; and though the medium 
through which it passes may dim the ray, still the 
soul that seeks to follow as far as it can see, shall 
not miss of its finding. 

"For meek obedience, too, is light, 
And following that, is finding him." 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. 

Let us listen to the zvords of our Lord — 
I am the Resurrection and the Life. 

Let us picture — 

^^*HE meeting of Jesus and Martha. We can 

^^^ imagine with what growing despair Martha 

had watched by the death-bed of Lazarus. 

The conviction that this illness was unto death 

had gradually come to her. There was nothing 

that it was within her power to do — she could only 

watch and see her brother die. And what would 

add to her pain was the perfect conviction that she 

had that there was one who could save him, if ori\y 

he were there But where to find him ; how tt . 

reach him? If only he would come! And whil ; 

she waits and hope grows fainter and fainter, Laza - 

rus dies. And then, after all is over, she hears that 

247 



248 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Jesus has come. Although it is too late to save 
Lazarus, she is anxious to see esus. "Lord, if thou 
hadst been here, my brother had not died." Is 
there just a shade of reproach? A feeling that he 
who had shown such wonderful power and knowl- 
edge, might have known that Lazarus was ill, might 
have come earlier? Is there an underlying hope 
in those other words : "But I know, that even now, 
whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it 
to thee." You have raised others from the dead — 
that was her wistful, unspoken, feeling. Watch 
our Lord, intent on increasing this hope, on calling 
out her faith in him. "Thy brother shall rise again." 
Yes; she knows that; she is well taught in her re- 
ligion; but that is not just what will comfort her 
now. We see her eyes fixed on our Lord in trem- 
bling hope of that something more ; and then it comes 
— "I am the Resurrection and the Life : he that be- 
lieveth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he 
live ; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall 
never die." 

Consider, first — 

That nowhere do we see more clearly the love 
and sympathy of Jesus than in his dealing with 
mourners. We watch him halting the funeral cor- 
tege outside the gates of Nain, and taking pity on 
the widow and restoring her son. We follow him 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 249 

through the crowd as he goes with Jairus to the 
chamber where his daughter lies, and see him take 
her by the hand and raise her up. We see him now, 
asking to be led to the tomb of Lazarus where he 
will speak the word of life that will bring him back 
from the dead. This human sympathy of our Lord, 
called out, as it is, by the circumstance of the day, is 
so ready and vivid a thing! And here in the case 
of this family of Bethany, there is that back-ground 
of human intercourse and affection, which tell of 
quiet hours spent by the weary Jesus in the peace of 
this home, where there was always ready for him 
the loving ministries that he must at times have 
longed for. When we are weary and heavy-laden, 
it is so good to have a place to rest. "Now Jesus 
loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus." His 
customary gravity is disturbed by the emotion of 
the moment: Jesus wept. As the sisters stood by 
the weeping Jesus, did they feel that the faint hopes 
they had felt in the news of his coming were being 
washed away in those tears? Did they feel, as 
the onlooking Jews felt, "Could not this man, which 
opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even 
this man should not have died?" Would he weep, 
if there was still any hope for them ? And then the 
words of life: "Lazarus come forth. And he that 
was dead came forth, bound hand and foot in grave- 
clothes." The stupendous wonder of the miracle 



2 5° THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

would, for a moment have prevented even joy. 
And then the joy of reunion. 

Consider, second — 

That the love and sympathy of Jesus is not a 
story of the past. It is a present experience; you 
and I know it. His revelation of God, and of God's 
attitude toward us, is a permanent thing. We 
build our lives and direct our experiences by the 
assumption that what our Lord was to the widow 
of Nain, to Jairus, to the sisters of Bethany, that 
he still is to-day, and toward us. We count with 
certainty on the experience of the same love and 
sympathy ; we know that the same human affection 
is about us, and that it is supported by the same di- 
vine power. Anyone who has led a sincerely Chris- 
tian life can at any moment go back into his ex- 
perience and find there the evidences of the divine 
love and care. They do not have to depend on the 
stories of the past; on the sight of Jesus standing 
at the grave of Lazarus, or at the gate of Nain, he 
has met them as they went out of the city gate 
despairing; he has stood by them as they wept at 
the tomb of those they loved. They can say out of 
their own experience, "The Lord is my Light and 
my Strength." Without this experience of Jesus, 
could our religion last? I cannot imagine that one 
can go on year after year, professing belief in a re- 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 251 

ligion that never justifies its promises in experience. 
I can not imagine any one going on for long, pro- 
fessing belief in a love of God that they have never 
felt warm about them. Jesus' presence in the house at 
Bethany is not some exceptional thing that we read 
with wonder, and regret that it cannot happen 
again. Jesus is in our house ; he sits with us at our 
tables, we minister to him; he rejoices in our 
happiness and comforts us in our sorrow ; he stands 
beside us when we watch our dead and says for our 
comfort, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." 

Let us, then, pray — 

That we may realize this constant presence of 
Jesus in all the joys and sorrows of our lives. Let 
us go forth to meet Jesus when we are mourning; 
let us hold his hand as we stand by our dead. Let 
us have confidence that he will be the power that 
will raise us from the dead. 

Grant, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the 
death of thy blessed Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, 
so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we 
may be buried with him; and that, through the 
grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful 
resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was 
buried, and rose again for us, thy Son, Jesus 
Christ, our Lord. 



»5 2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

I suppose that there are no words which have 
brought such a flood of help and comfort to human 
souls as these words of our Lord. We, who have 
lived our lives in the light of Christian revelation, 
are unable to appreciate what death meant before 
that revelation came. There came death to every 
man, and after that a great interrogation point. 
Was man still living or had he utterly perished cut 
of the universe? If he lived, was he still man, or 
had he passed into some other form of life? If he 
lived, was his state better or worse? These ques- 
tions found an answer in our Lord's words, backed 
as they were by such an exhibition of his power as 
the raising of Lazarus. 

It is true that there were theories enough about 
the future state of man current in the time of cur 
Lord: the Jews, indeed, believed in a future resur- 
rection. But it is one thing to have a theory of a 
Resurrection, to be told, as Mary and Martha had 
been told, that there would be a Resurrection on 
the last day; it was another thing to have that 
Resurrection connected with a person who is him- 
self the guarantee of its truth, because he himself 
has passed through the experience of death. There 
are, no doubt, still doubters, people who to-day are 
yet saying, that we are quite ignorant of the future, 
that no one has returned from the other side of 
death. But that is not true. Lazarus returned- 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 253 

The widow's son of Nain returned, the daughter of 
Jairus returned. "But they left no memoirs and 
went back again without speaking any words that 
have reached us. We should be glad to listen to 
•a report of their experience." That, no doubt, is 
true ; but there is one who did not go back without 
speaking, one who assures us that he has passed 
through the experience of death, and that, when the 
time comes that we must meet it, he will go with 
us. He assures us that when we go out of this life 
we shall not go out into the dark, friendless and 
lonely, but that we shall go with him. That world 
which men still speak of as dark and unknown, is 
neither dark nor unknown to those who have the 
vision of faith. To those our Lord has revealed it, 
lighted by his word and by his presence. Unknown 
in the sense that we cannot picture it to the imagina- 
tion it still is ; but it is not unknown in its essential 
conditions. We know all that we need to knew. 
We know that it is the world of our Father that we 
go to, filled with the light and glory of his presence, 
and filled too with the love and sympathy of our 
Saviour who has gone before us to make ready the 
way, who is, indeed, himself the Way in that as in 
all worlds. He who stood at the grave of Lazarus 
and said, "Come forth," will stand at the gate of 
Paradise and say, "come in." "Come ye blessed of 



254 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you 
from the foundation of the world." 

To-day, then, if the world is still filled with men 
and women who are ignorant of what lies on the 
other side of death, they are ignorant as any one 
may be of any subject which they decline to study. 
And because the instinct of immortality has been 
deep in men at all times, we may say that the ig- 
norance of it is not a natural but an acquired ig- 
norance — the ignorance of those who have reasoned 
themselves out of the natural belief which should 
have led them to the reception of the guarantees 
with which Christianity certifies it. If to-day men 
meet death as a thing dreaded and unknown it is 
because they ignore the information that is at their 
hand. They are as men starting on a far journey 
who should ignore all the reports of the travelers 
who have preceded them, and insist on treating the 
country through which they are to travel as un- 
known and unexplored. Professor Tyndale, with 
all the hope of the Gospel before him, with that 
certainty of the supremacy of Christ over death 
which had sustained the dying for so many gen- 
erations of Christians and removed from them all 
fear of the grave and what lies beyond it present to 
his mind, could not dare to say, "Like streaks of 
morning cloud we fade into the infinite azure of the 
past." Professor Huxley, writing to his sister on. 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 255 

the death of their mother, says, (and oh ! the pity of 
it) "I offer you no consolation, my dear sister, for 
I know of none." Surely of all men most miser- 
able! It is worth while being a Christian if only 
to have something better to say than that in the face 
of death. We, standing by the bed of death, hear 
a shout of triumph over it, "Death is swallowed 
up in victory." We turn away from the place 
where the tired body is laid at rest comforted by 
the words of one who had seen the Risen and As- 
cended Jesus ; "I would not have you to be ignorant, 
brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye 
sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. 
For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, 
even them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring 
with him." 

We may be bold to say that our Lord could not 
be satisfied by transient intercourse with us, but that 
he will have us to be with him forever. There is no 
thought in all our religion that is more overwhelm- 
ing than that; and yet that is what is involved in 
his taking to himself our nature, in his wanting to 
be with us at all. I fancy that we sometimes think 
of the love of our Lord as a kind of abstract and 
general love, a love of the race, that seeks the good 
of humanity as a whole, that applies to individuals 
as they are included in the race, but lacks the per- 
sonal note which our human love has. We think it 



2 $6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

a part of our limitation and feebleness that we can- 
not express any fervid love of men, but only for the 
individuals whom we know, or at least know of. 
God's love is greater, in that it can embrace the 
whole at once. That is true ; God's love does em- 
brace the whole; but it would be feeble like ours, 
only in an inverse sense, if the love of the individual 
man was weakened by his being loved only as a unit 
in the whole mass of humanity. Perhaps it would 
clear our thought if we were to substitute for the 
rather threadbare notion of love that we have, the 
thought of the friendliness of God. That seems to 
me to accent the personal relation: "I have called 
you friends;" and when we hear our Lord saying 
that, we seem to get the note of intimacy. St. 
John shows his unfailing insight as to the meaning 
of spiritual reality when he says of our Lord that 
he loved "his own," a word revealing the closeness 
of his union with us. Our Lord loved, not the 
Apostles, but Peter and James and John. And he 
loves each of us in the same close, personal way. 
May we not dare to say that while the love of God 
is infinite and perfect for all his children, yet for 
each child there is an uniqueness in the love which 
is determined by the quality of the child himself? 
That would seem to be implied in any relation that 
we can rightly call personal. 

Much the same truth is implied in the fact of our 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE «57 

creation, if we will think it out. If God created us 
it is because he wanted us. We cannot think of 
God as setting in motion forces over which he after- 
wards loses control, or as contemplating the results 
of those forces simply in the large, without thought 
of the individual. Men talk of the evolution of the 
universe as a fast process working to ends that are 
unspeakably great, but remorseless of the fate of 
the individual. God is to them the commander-in- 
chief of a great army who directs it to a successful 
campaign, but is thoughtless of the fate of the in- 
dividual. Cruelty to the individual is a necessary 
accident in the working out of the whole plan. But 
in the light of our Lord's teaching we may not so 
think of God. His thought is as close to the man 
who falls out of the ranks to die by the wayside, as 
to the advance of the whole army. And if we have 
to conceive of him as sacrificing the individual to 
the mass, it is through no failure of love and ten- 
derness to the individual; it is still the personal 
love and care of God which guides his treatment of 
us. There is no hiding or forgetfulness of that 
when he appoints us to bear the burden and heat of 
the day. There is an often missed note in our 
Lord's teaching of the particular providence of 
God: "Not a sparrow falls to the ground without 
your Father." It is the seeming waste and loss 
that our Lord stresses as evidence of the priceless 
08) 



«5 8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

care of God. And the response of the divine giv- 
ing is wonderfully set out in St. Paul's saying : "He 
that spared not his own son, but delivered him up 
for us all, how shall he not with him freely give 
us all things?" 

Our Lord's mission was not solely or chiefly a 
mission of teaching. He came to rescue us and 
bring us into unity with himself and with the 
Father. He came that he might abide with us for- 
ever. There is nothing transient in his relation to 
us; it is a relation for eternity. Our Lord enters 
humanity as a permanent power, as the ever-spring- 
ing source of its inner life. His power in us be- 
comes that "Power of an endless life" of which the 
author of the epistle of the Hebrews speaks. That 
is an illuminating phrase. When our life acquires 
stability our whole attitude is changed. It is the 
feeling of human weakness and instability and 
of the f ruitlessness of even our best efforts. The best 
and greatest that man can do has no more signi- 
ficance than his least and weakest, if in the end 
nothing but the grave awaits him, if "that which 
befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts, even 
one thing befalleth them ; as the one dieth, so dieth 
the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a 
man hath no preeminence above the beast." Again 
and again has the conviction that this is man's fate 
paralyzed his best efforts, and driven him to seek 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 259 

from life the most that the senses can give of tran- 
sient enjoyment, "to suck his orange dry" while he 
has it. Men of nobler mode have sought to lose 
themselves in the thought of the race and to see a 
factitious immortality in the continued existence of 
humanity. There is an element of greatness in 
this — to spend one's life unselfishly for the profit 
of those whom we shall never see and who, per- 
chance, will never hear of us. But this too is 
vanity, for there is no immortality of the race. 
However distant, still the hour strikes when the 
race of man will vanish from an exhausted planet — 
the years of the earth are as nothing to the years of 
eternity. It is the revelation of an endless life 
which brings to us the sense of power, bringing, as 
it were, the conviction that we work for an eternity 
in which we shall share. That which is best in us 
is permanent, the silver and gold and precious 
stones abide; only the wood and hay and stubble 
perish. Whatever of worth we succeed in accom- 
plishing is a permanent contribution to the wealth 
of the universe. In the power of an endless life, 
stimulated and energized, we throw ourselves into 
the work of the kingdom as those whose citizen- 
ship contains the promise of an eternal inheritance 
destined not to fade away even with the passing 
of all things temporal. We are participants of the 
unshaken things which remain after the removing 



*6o THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of those things that are shaken. We are inhabi- 
tants of the eternal years. 

This power which entering into men gives them 
eternity, this power of an endless life, is the power 
of him who is the Life, and is the power by which 
men rise from the dead. Our Resurrection is a 
certainty because we are in him: we cannot be 
separated from him by anything but our own will. 
Separation is always against his will and his work, 
against the effort he is making to master us now. 
God is not a God of the dead, he does not form 
some new relation with men after they are dead. 
The power that shall bring about our Resurrection 
is not some new power that shall be exerted upon 
us at the Resurrection at the last day: it is work- 
ing in us now. 

It is the power that results from our union with 
him, and consequently we see that the maintenance 
of this life of union is the end toward which our 
spiritual activities are to be directed. Our lives 
must be conducted with a sense of their possibil- 
ities : we work with our eyes on the future in which 
the full significance of the child of God shall first 
appear. Having that in mind we are content with 
the slowness of our attainment here. We are con- 
tent to do pioneer work; to sow for a distant har- 
vest, knowing that in the end "we shall reap, if we 
faint not." The present has no importance except 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 26 1 

as a part of a whole. We are told of the impor- 
tance of this life, of this world. Yes, it is important, 
if it is continuous with another world. If it is an 
experience entirely unrelated, if we conceive hu- 
man experience here as uninfluential on the future 
life, it would seem that this world cannot have 
much importance. And that is the way in which a 
large part of the human race seems to regard life. 
Any kind of a life here is to be followed automati- 
cally by an improved life hereafter. Such a dis- 
agreeable thing as hell cannot be conceived to exist 
anywhere in the universe of God. That can only 
mean that there is no continuity between this world 
and the next, and that character does not count; 
that saint and sinner alike, having passed through 
the experience of death, shall be welcomed to the 
Mansions of the Blessed. But it is inconceivable 
that we should slip out of one character and into 
another because we have crossed the threshold that 
divides two states of being. If this is possible, then 
both life and God are unintelligible, being guided by 
no continuity of purpose. We can only base hope 
on a purpose in the universe that shows itself to be 
stable. We have no courage or stimulus to work 
if death results, not in the unveiling of a world in 
which the spiritual actions begun in this world con- 
tinue and progress, but into a topsy-turveydom in 
which values are completely altered and anything 



a 62 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

may happen. We are told that final separation 
from God is inconceivable; that God will not toler- 
ate such a blot on the universe as is implied in the 
existence of souls that are unreconciled to him. 
But the essence of hell is the separation of the soul 
from God; and that would seem to be as conceiva- 
ble at one period of God's rule of the universe as 
at another. The soul dead in trespasses and sin 
exists now, and in that state of death passes to the 
next stage of existence; that it should be acknowl- 
edged as existing in this state, and be inconceivable 
in the next state, can only be because we are im- 
posing our artificial divisions, arising out of time- 
conditions, upon the universe as related to God. 
Neither is it necessary to conceive of the state of 
"the lost" as implying continued rebellion against 
God. What that state really implies is lost capac- 
ity for the Beatific Vision as the result of opposi- 
tion to God. The opposition may cease, doubtless 
does cease, without the capacity being recreated — 
for that is what would have to take place. It is not 
necessary to think of hell as punishment in any 
other sense than this: that the rejection of spiritual 
life here is a permanent fact, a loss which cannot 
be made good hereafter. That is a sufficiently aw- 
ful thought: but it is less awful than the thought 
that the universe is governed by a purpose on the 
stability of which we cannot count. 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE *6$ 

Mary and Martha had faith in the Resurrection 
of the dead. "I know that he shall rise again in 
the Resurrection at the last day." But that was 
not the faith that our Lord wanted to create in 
them. He was calling man to a faith that was 
richer than any that was possible under the older 
dispensation. Our Lord had come to make that 
richer faith possible. He wanted the sisters to be- 
lieve, not that Lazarus would rise again, but that he 
was not really dead. "I am the Resurrection and 
the life: he that believeth on me, though he were 
dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and 
believeth on me shall never die." Men had for 
centuries believed in the survival by the soul of 
death; they had even believed in some places in a 
final Resurrection; but what our Lord taught was 
that those who were in him, those whom he had 
united to himself, did not die in the sense that death 
wrought any separation between himself and them. 
Their relation to him is Untouched by death ; so far 
as it is affected at all, it is in the direction of a more 
perfect revelation and a closer union. 

Have we that attitude toward death? Do we 
think of it as weaving tighter the bond between our 
Lord and us? Do we think of the world beyond 
death as being for the Christian a nearer, bet- 
ter understood communion with our Saviour? Do 
we think of it as the entrance upon a new phase of 



264 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

that Eternal Life which, our will and work co-oper- 
ating, our Lord has been imparting to us here ? As 
we conceive the "other world" as continuous with 
this, and the "other life" as but the fruitage of this, 
we begin to understand the importance of this life. 
We understand the creative power of our present 
living. We are big with our own future, we are 
creating our future selves. We are laying up the 
treasure which survives all temporal change. M. 
Rolland has put it finely : "In the measure that one 
lives, in the measure that one creates, in the mea- 
sure that one loves and loses those whom one 
loves, one escapes death. In the creation of a new 
work we escape from ourselves and are saved in 
the work we have created, in the souls whom we 
have loved and who have left us." However de- 
fective M. Rolland's belief in immortality, his 
words are true for the Christian. Not only we our- 
selves, but all our work is in Christ. There it 1% 
stored up for us and we have lost nothing. No 
thought, no work, which is the expression of our 
life in him can ever be lost, but is a permanent en- 
richment of our nature. 

Could we endure to think of another world if this 
were not so? Could we endure to think of death 
as the closing of one story, a story we have written 
in tears and joy, a story into the making of which 
all the passion and energy of our life went, and the 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 265 

beginning of another which is continuous with it 
only in the sense that it has the same hero ? I would 
as soon believe in some theory of transmigration by 
which I am to resume life, indeed, but under an 
altered form and in entire forgetfulness of what 
has gone before. The glory of the Christian be- 
lief in the Resurrection Life is that it is the same 
life in Christ, carrying with it all its content that 
has been laid up in Christ. Its human relations 
established in this world, if they have been spirit- 
ualized and rendered stable by their relation to our 
Lord, go with it into the other world. Nothing is 
lost that is loved in our Lord ; all the affections we 
have known here we resume there, if they were in 
him. Thus have the thoughts of the Christian been 
beautifully translated : 

Sleep on, Beloved, sleep and take thy rest, 
Lay down thy head upon thy Saviour's breast, 
We love thee well, but Jesus loves thee best — 
Good night. 

Calm is thy slumber as an infant's sleep, 
But thou shalt wake no more to toil or weep, 
Thine is a perfect rest, secure and deep — 
Good night. 

Until the shadow from the earth is cast, 
Until he gathers in his sheaves at last. 
Until the twilight gloom is overpast — 
Good night. 



266 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Until the Easter glory lights the skies, 
Until the dead in Jesus shall arise, 
And he shall come, and not in lowly guise — 
Good night. 

Until made beautiful by love divine, 
Thou in the likeness of thy Lord shall shine. 
And he shall bring that golden crown of thine — 
Good night. 

Only "Good Night," Beloved, not farewell, 
A little while, and all his saints shall dwell 
In hallowed union, indivisible — 
Good night. 

Until we meet again before his throne, 
Clothed in the spotless robes he gives his own, 
Until we know, even as we are known — 
Good night. 

Have you noticed what our Lord said to his 
Apostles when he told them of Lazarus' death ? He 
said^ "I am glad for your sake that I was not 
there." He stresses a great value that the death 
and raising of Lazarus was to have for them and 
those who should come after them. It was to be 
the great demonstration that he is the Life, second 
only in value for our faith to his own Resurrection. 
It manifests the completeness of his mastery of the 
humanity which he had taken. He who is Essen- 
tial Life shows how great is the power of that Life 
—a power that easily triumphs over the power of 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 267 

death. As we stand by the open grave and hear 
his summons: "Lazarus, come forth"; and see 
"Him that was dead come forth bound hand and 
foot in grave clothes," we are prepared for our 
Lord's own Resurrection. For how could he who 
has such power over death be himself bound by it? 
We are prepared for our own death which we now 
understand can be but a passing incident to those 
who have been united to the Essential Life. 

But there is another truth that lies in our Lord's 
word which casts much light on the divine method 
of our education. It brings out the fact that that 
education is along the lines of sacrifice. As God in 
Christ willingly sacrificed himself, so he does not 
hesitate to demand sacrifices of his children. It is 
involved in the vocation of the child of God that he 
be ready at the divine call to offer himself, glad that 
his Father has provided him somewhat to offer, and 
will accept this service at his hand. 

In order that our Lord might thus demonstrate 
his mastery of life and death it was necessary that 
Lazarus should suffer and die. Do we shrink 
from the sacrifices that God asks of us ? It is writ- 
ten that "Jesus loved Martha and Mary and Laz- 
arus." Let that sink into our hearts; when God 
asks us for sacrifice, he is asking us to serve him. 
For the most part we are sent out on some hidden 
path of service the meaning of which we do not 



8 68 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

see. What is required of us is not to understand, 
but to act in loyal faith. The explanation will 
come in time. He said to an Apostle : "What I do, 
thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know here- 
after." Lazarus* burden was of the heaviest. He 
was called to suffer, to die, and to be called back 
from death, only once more to pass the same ex- 
perience. Jesus loved Lazarus, and because he 
loved him he could ask of him this great service. 
We know that we shall not ask in vain of those 
whom we love and who love us — for Lazarus loved 
Jesus. I dwell often on this coming back of Laz- 
arus, not in idle curiosity as to what he had experi- 
enced in the three days, but in wonder at the love 
of our Lord that must have been his that our Lord 
could ask of him this great thing. There are not 
many, I fancy, of whom our Lord could have asked 
so much. Let us think of that when next our Lord 
calls us to any suffering or loss — that God is pro- 
posing to us a mode of service, proposing it to us 
because he trusts us. There are other reasons, no 
doubt, why we are called to suffer ; but this at least 
is one of them; that God loves us so much and so 
trusts our love of him, that he feels that he can 
trust us for a little with the bearing of his Cross, 
and that we will bear it gladly and with unfailing 
faith. 
It is another form of the same divine asking that 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 269 

we see when we look at the case of Mary and 
Martha. There had been to them the anxious days 
of waiting by the brother's sick-bed ; there had been 
the feeling that there was one who could help, if 
only they could reach him ; there had been the dis- 
appointment that he did not come. We seem to 
read between the lines of the story that the sisters 
were expectant of our Lord — that they felt that ho 
must know and would come. But the brother died 
and was laid in the tomb and hope faded. Even 
the onlookers at the meeting of our Lord and tho 
sisters, felt that this was a case where he might ba 
expected to intervene with that power that he had 
so often exercised on behalf of the ill : — "Could not 
this man, which opened the eyes of the blind have 
caused that even this man should not have died?" 
They felt that the love that our Lord bore to the 
family at Bethany created an obligation of help- 
fulness toward them. What they could not see was 
that the obligation was mutual — that there was an 
obligation of love toward our Lord. Our Lord is 
calling into activity both sides of the relation. Be- 
cause their faith and love was so great that it could 
bear any strain he might put upon it, he asked them 
to endure the pain of their brother's illness and 
death in order that he might "Manifest his glory" 
and show forth the power of the Life which he is. 
Their sufferings were incident to the perpetual wit- 



270 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ness of our Lord's power in the raising of Lazarus, 
and they were rewarded by the renewed evidence 
of his love that his action toward them showed. 

It is from such stories as this that we learn the 
inner meaning of suffering. We simply darken 
counsel when we declaim against the justice of the 
world-order, and deny that wisdom and love are 
visible in a world in which pain prevails. The 
thought of our time shows its superficiality and in- 
competence to deal with spiritual problems, in the 
impatience and bitterness of its utterances in re- 
gard to the suffering that is in the world. That is 
because it declines to study the action of Jesus as 
the perfect revelation of God. It has created an 
ideal of comfort as the last word of a world which 
is governed by justice, and denounces a God who 
will not live up to its ideal. But from the action 
of Jesus we learn that comfort is not the ideal of 
God for his creatures, but the passion of love which 
draws them to union with himself. Love lives 
above comfort, and is eager for service and sacri- 
fice; and the most eager of all loves to give itself 
unstintingly, is the love of God. "God so loved the 
world that he gave his only begotten son," and the 
son having "loved his own, loved them unto the 
uttermost." It is a mark of our union with our 
blessed Lord that we love thus without limit, — that 
we so love that we understand that back of all God'* 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE fJJ 

asking of us for sacrifice is his perfect love. We 
have learned that even the sharpest pain of separa- 
tion from those we love, may be met without any 
tinge of bitterness or rebellion, met with glad look- 
ing on to a union re-knit in a deeper love. 

"Oh, blest! It is for us, not thee, we grieve! 
Yet even so, ye voices, and you tide 
Of souls innumerous that panting heave 
To rhythmic pulses of God's heart, and hide 
Beneath your myriad booming breakers wide 
The universal life invisible, 
Give praise ! Behold, the void that was so still, 

"Breaks into singing, and the desert cries — 
Praise, praise to thee ! praise for thy Servant, Death, 
The Healer and Deliverer ! From his eyes 
Flows life that cannot die; yea, with his breath 
The dross of weary earth he winnoweth, 
Leaving all pure and perfect things to be 
Merged in the soul of thine immensity! 

"Praise, Lord, yea, praise, for this our Brother Death 
Though also for the fair mysterious veil 
Of life that from thy radiance severeth 
Our mortal sight, for these faint blossoms frail 
Of joy on earth we cherish, for the pale 
Light of the circling years, we praise thee too:— 
Since thus as in a web thy spirit through 

"The phantom world is woven: — Yet thrice praise 
For him who frees us ! Surely, we shall gain, 
Ai guerdon for the exile of these days, 



2 7* THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Oneness with thee; and as the drops of rain, 
Cast from the sobbing cloud in Summer's pain, 
Resume their rest in ocean, even so we, 
Lost for a while, shall find ourselves in thee." 

We all face death ; but we face it unshirkingly in 
him who is its Conqueror, who is the Resurrection 
and the Life of all who die in him. Conscious of 
being in him we look out with eyes in which there 
is no terror toward the setting sun and note that 
for us the clouds are taking on the autumnal splen- 
dors which tell of the fast approaching end of the 
world — of the "little day" of our lives. Old age 
comes on, and we feel it come with serenity of 
mind. There is, no doubt, an old age that is an 
horrible thing — hard, rebellious, godless. We feel 
under its phenomena a fierce restlessness, the lack 
of any peace with God, any trust in Christ, any 
communion with the Blessed Spirit. The aged are 
often like men being dragged to execution, fruit- 
lessly struggling against the inevitable. All this is too 
terrible to think of. And it is little better when the 
approach of death is met with a dumb Stoicism, or 
with eyes in which we see the fear that no one 
speaks of. The priest is called to bedsides, where 
he is warned by foolish physicians and doubting 
friends that he must not speak of death or the sacra- 
ments lest fear should take a few hours from a 
life already spent. That is a horrible fear, and one 



I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE 273 

that we should arm ourselves against ere the hcur 
of our departing strikes. It is guarded against by 
a life in Jesus, a life consciously committed to him 
in all its ways and all its hours, a life that we feel 
will not be shattered but crowned by death. To 
those who have found Jesus to be already their 
Resurrection and their Life, death is but the going 
out to him — the discovering of a face that they have 
long wished to see. The oncoming of age is felt to 
be his approach, and as it comes there is a thin- 
ning of the veils that hide him now. Calm and 
serene those aged ones wait ; their days are marked 
by an ever deepening peace. You catch a glimpse 
of them when they think that they are alone, and 
the lips are murmuring a prayer which is a speak- 
ing with Jesus whom they seem to see, for their 
faces are lit with the light of his presence, and their 
eyes smile at visions which are invisible to us. The 
mysteries of the hidden life have been revealed to 
them. They speak out of a rich experience of the 
things they have seen and known. Their laid up 
treasure of loved ones is very near to them — they 
can now almost speak across the ever-narrowing 
space that separates them. There is a growing 
silence, for they have not much more to say to this 
world and its interests. The peace of God is al- 
ready upon them; they meet the "last enemy ,, in 
the realized love of the Father : 
(19) 



a 74 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Into the silent, starless Night before us, 

Naked we glide; 
No hand has mapped the constellations o'er us, 

No comrade at our side, 

No chart, no guide. 

Yet fearless toward that midnight, black and hollow, 

Our footsteps fare; 
The beckoning of a Father's hand we follow— 

His love alone is there, 

No curse, no care. 

Let us, then, rejoice in death, looking to the 
meeting that is beyond when "we shall know even 
as we are known." 

"Thou hast embarked; thou hast made the voy- 
age ; thou art coming to the shore ; now land !" 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD. 
Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 

I am he that liveth and was dead. 

Let us picture — 

^^*HE Risen Lord as he appeared to St. John. 
^^ There are several visions in which our 
Lord appeared to the Apostle whom he 
loved. He walks amid the Golden Candlesticks and 
has the Seven Stars in his hands ; he appears as the 
Lamb slain for the sins of the world; or again, he 
is the Lamb standing on Mount Sion surrounded 
by the hosts of the Pure. Let us see him as in this 
last vision, while the New Song goes up to the ac- 
companiment of the music of the harpers harping 
with their harps. We see the Throne, and the Liv- 
ing Creatures and the Elders, and, surrounding 
them the "hundred and forty and four thousand 
having his Name and the Name of his Father writ- 

275 



276 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ten in their foreheads." These have entered into 
the joy of their Lord. And as we watch them 
there, we feel, do we not ? that their earthly life is 
justified. "These are they whom men aforetime 
had in derision and made a proverb of reproach; 
whose life they counted madness and their end 
without honor. But now they are seen to be num- 
bered among the children of God, and their lot to be 
among the saints." If we would from time to time 
look into heaven through the eyes of St. John, we 
would run less danger of a false estimate of the 
meaning of this life. The real meaning of life can 
only be read in its outcome. And the meaning of 
the life of the saints is seen to be that they dwell 
in the presence of their Master, and that they fol- 
low him whithersoever he goeth. Look once more 
at the Lamb and the multitude of his Holy Ones; 
listen once more to the Voice as the voice of many 
waters. 

Consider, -first — 

That we are constantly to judge of life by some 
fragment of it, some passing experience, some 
merely temporary phase of existence. We hardly 
ever pause to make the attempt to relate the present 
experience to the whole meaning of life. We say, 
perhaps, that we cannot know the whole meaning 
of life ; but we can, in broad outline. We do know 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 277 

the purpose of God for life, the end to which life 
tends if we cling to that purpose. We can read the 
issue of human life because we can read the issue 
of our Lord's life. We know that God's purpose 
for us is that, like our Lord, we should triumph 
over death and pass, by means of our joyful Resur- 
rection, to be with him forever. Consider, that 
pain and trial, struggle and suffering, we know to 
be part of the discipline that issues in triumph over 
death and eternal association with him who through 
his death and Resurrection passed to the Throne 
of his Kingdom. Our Lord is not pictured to us, 
after his Resurrection, as enthroned in solitary- 
grandeur over a world of conquered subjects; but 
he is pictured as living in the closest intimacy with 
all those who have faithfully followed the steps of 
his most holy life. His prayer is answered, and 
where he is, there are his servants also. When 
stripped of the gorgeous symbolism wherewith St. 
John has clothed his visions, the heavenly world is 
a very human world : a world of love and sympathy 
and joy and constant intercourse of the Redeemer 
with one another and with their Lord. It is not at 
all, as it has been imagined, a world so artificial and 
unreal as to be repulsive; it is a world where hu- 
man life developed to its highest capacity, is all the 
more beautifully human because it is filled with the 
divine. 



f 78 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Consider, second — 

That the conquest over death, which is the essen- 
tial preliminary to our entrance into the Life of 
the Blessed, is not a thing that begins when we die 
— that we may therefore excuse ourselves from con- 
sidering till we die ; but our conquest of death be- 
gins now. We have already entered into Life. All 
that part of our experience that we can accurately 
characterize as Christian is a part of the per- 
manent acquisition of life, an earnest of the 
life of heaven that we are to experience 
more fully hereafter. We have not to wait 
till the morrow of death to know the meaning of 
love and joy and peace; to know the reality of com- 
munion with God. The fruits of the spirit are not 
perishable fruits that fall from our lives, leaving no 
trace. They are abiding fruits, that are garnered 
unto Life Eternal. It is ours now to "taste and see 
how gracious the Lord is." Every spiritual victory 
that we gain, every spiritual experience of which 
we reap the fruit, takes its place in the eternal ac- 
quisitions of life. They are victories won over 
death; that is, victories the results of which death 
cannot destroy. Our life is a continuous whole, 
each stage issuing from the preceding stage, each 
experience growing out of the preceding experi- 
ence. Let us learn to judge of our activities from 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 2ff 

the point of view of their eternal values — learn to 
distinguish the wood, hay, stubble, from the silver 
and gold and precious stones that will endure the 
fires of the judgment. Death can have no terrors 
for those who have already passed from death unto 
Life; those whose association with our Lord now 
is so intimate that death can only result in the 
strengthening of the bonds of affection, not in their 
rupture. ''Having loved his own, he loved them 
unto the end :" let us so love him. 

Let us, then, pray — 

For deeper love and more conscious association 
with our Lord now. Let us pray to shape our lives 
always with conscious reference to their end, which 
is to be with our Lord. 

O God, who by Christ's Resurrection restorest 
us to Life Eternal ; raise us up to the Author of our 
salvation, who is seated at thy Right Hand ; that he 
who came to be judged for our sake, may ccme to 
judge in our favor, Jesus Christ, thy only Son, our 
Lord. 

We give thee thanks, O God the Father, who 
hast delivered us from the power of darkness, and 
translated us into the kingdom of thy Son; grant 
therefore, we pray thee, that as by his death he 
has recalled us to life, he may raise us up in his love 



280 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

to joys eternal ; through the same Jesus Christ, thy 
Son, our Lord, 

What we are shown in the Book of the Revela- 
tion is the Christ who has triumphed. The work 
of redemption is over; past is that wondering life 
of ministry which is the perfect expression of the 
sympathy of God ; over are the pain and weariness 
which were the outcome of his efforts to minister 
to "his own"; past is the Cross on which he had 
hung looking out over a world that had rejected 
him, but which thus "lifting up" would some day 
bring to his feet. By his victory he has won the 
right to reign and has passed through the heavens 
and is set down at the Right Hand of God. When 
St. John opens the door of heaven that we may 
look in, we see our Lord acting there on behalf of 
the work of his Incarnate Body : he is sending mes- 
sages to his earthly Church. The care that he 
shows for those whom he has left to carry on his 
work proves to us that he is the same Jesus whom 
we have known in the pages of the Gospel. His 
attitude in heaven toward men is the same attitude 
that he maintained on earth, the attitude of close 
and personal love. W r e feel, indeed, that as the As- 
cended Head of the Church he is continuously 
watching over every detail of the life of his Body. 
The letters that he sends from heaven to the "Seven 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 28 1 

churches" have a wider intent than the warning and 
encouragement of the particular church to which 
they are sent. They have the further intention that 
they reveal once for all our Lord's attitude to the 
Church on earth. Every detail of its life is inter- 
esting to him, he is watching its sins and its failures, 
its hopes and successes, and that not with the silent 
watchfulness of an interested spectator, but with 
an energetic watchfulness which intervenes con- 
stantly in the course of the Church's life with 
praise and blame, with reward and punishment. 
The growth and the dying of Christian commun- 
ities is not merely due to the operation of the laws 
of social development, it is not a department of an- 
thropology or biology, but is due to the action of 
our Lord. The Church is being continuously 
judged and disciplined that it may respond better 
to the will of its Risen Master, that it may more 
completely embody the mind of its Ascended Head. 
"I am he that liveth and was dead": that is his 
message to his Church on earth. And there is great 
significance in that backward look — "and was 
dead." There is in it a recording of all his human 
experience, the suggestion that by that experience 
he triumphed and won for his humanity the place 
that it now holds at the Right Hand of the Father. 
He has won the right to be the Head of the Body. 
It is no transient victory, the results of which are 



2 8a THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

presently to be laid aside. Our humanity in him 
has reached the state of stable union with the di- 
vine — "and behold I am alive forever more." Our 
risen humanity has become central in the spiritual 
world, it has become the permanent medium of the 
divine action for the spiritualization of man. 
Through it man attains the end for which he was 
created. Heaven is no state to which choice souls 
are translated after having been rescued from the 
sinfulness that is in this world; but is the term of 
the evolution of the spiritual man. The evolution 
which began with the dawn of life upon this planet, 
and proceeds to its consummation in the production 
of the animal man, and there came to an end, no 
high physical form being produced or to be ex- 
pected, was the basis of another and higher evolu- 
tionary process, a process still going on, by which 
the spiritual man is brought forth. That process 
only begins here ; we see but its first stages : its com- 
pletion is wrought out in the union of the human 
and the divine, and is revealed in its entirety in 
heaven, where the soul shall be once more united 
to the body, but to a changed and spiritualized 
body, fit to be the medium of the spirit's action. 
This process is completed in Christ, and is proceed- 
ing in all those who are in Christ. The first stages 
of this evolutionary process are what we are now 
witnessing in this world, evidenced by the conflict 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 283 

of light and darkness, the tremendous clash of spir- 
itual and material ideals, which mark the now exist- 
ing world-order. Our lives are set on the battle- 
field where the opposed forces swing and sway, ard 
interwined in perplexing combinations, where tne 
front is ever changing, and the inrush of new com- 
batants, on this side or that is compelling new form- 
ations. What seem to us social crises, the rise and 
fall of ecclesiastical systems, new phases of thought, 
new philosophies and morals, are but these shifting 
combinations of the battlefield, whereby the 
process of the spiritual evolution of man is taking 
place. It seems to us, pausing in the midst of the 
battle and trying to get a glimpse through ihe 
smoke and dust of the groupings on the field, that 
the battle now sways this way and now that, that it 
is uncertain on which side will lie the victory, or, 
indeed, that the powers of darkness are in posses- 
sion of the field. But there are times when the 
wind of the Spirit clears the sky, and our raised 
eyes see a Throne set amid the glories of the hea- 
vens, and we catch the words of the anthem that 
drifts out, "worthy is the Lamb which was slain to 
receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and 
strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing .... 
blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto 
him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb 
forever and ever." And we hear a voice, a human 



284 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

voice, saying, "I am he that liveth and was dead, 
and behold I am alive forever more." And we 
know that all is well upon the battle-field over which 
floats the banner of the Resurrection. 

And it is well too with each one of those who 
goes out to battle under that banner. The tend- 
ancy of our narrow outlook is to make us timid and 
pessimistic. We dwell on death as though that 
were the final thing. All things end in death, we 
say with a sigh. There is a touch of morbidity in 
the mind that makes the hectic tones of autumn, or 
the dying glow of the sunset, the characteristic sym- 
bols of human life. It is life that is imperishable, — 
not the waning Autumn but the resurgent Spring 
is the symbol of our life. We only seem to die, we 
do not die utterly. He who said, "I am the Resur- 
rection and the Life; he that believeth on me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whoso- 
ever liveth and believeth in me shall never die" has 
our lives in his keeping. You shall go out and see 
the whole hillside lying sun-baked and bare under 
the cloudless heaven which long has restrained its 
rain. The fire may sweep over it, and it shall be as 
a blackened desolation before your eyes. But let 
the heavens be overcast and the rain come, and it is 
but hours before it springs to vivid greenness. So 
it is often with the life of our spirit. There are 
times when its ebb runs very low, when unwatered 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 285 

by any rain, life lies like the hillside, sun-baked and 
brown. The pitiless glare of the world-sun has 
dried it up; the heat of passion has exhausted it, 
Its energies have vanished. Such a period is apt 
to come upon us in middle life when the ideals of 
youth have lost their fascination or been disappoint- 
ed, and the ideals of maturity are yet to come. In 
the interval, we have felt the fascination of a dis- 
cordant set of ideals, the ideals of the market-place 
of this world. Our spiritual powers are thrust into 
the background and their pleading with us is not 
listened to. How one trembles for the man in the 
moment of his worldly success. His life is ever 
harder baked by the sun of prosperity and by the 
hot winds of care. In this "fullness of bread," we 
ask, is materialism going to master him? Already 
the life of the Spirit is waning and its meaning i9 
being lost. The special times that belong to God 
are being absorbed by the need of pleasure, of ex- 
ercise, of society ; they are snatched as brief breath- 
ing-places, but the breath that he takes in these di- 
vinely provided pauses, is no longer the breath of 
divine refreshment, his failing strength no longer 
seeks the food of God: the weary brain and nerve 
seek relief, not in the repose of God's peace, but in 
the motor, the golf-links, the club, the week's-end. 
God fades out of the consciousness ; the conscience 
is relieved by "good works," that is, checks flung to 



286 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

charity. The disease of the strong, the able, the 
successful, the characteristic disease of middle age, 
is upon the man — confidence in the stability and 
completeness of this world. It is pity ! For the be- 
ginnings of the man's life had lain otherwhere. 
"Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God." 

But it may be that our vision, which sees only 
death, is deceived by the brownness of the sun- 
baked hillside. It may be that with the coming of 
the rain, the Autumn rain, there will be a Resurrec- 
tion of seemingly dead things. It may turn out 
that where we saw death there was but suspended 
animation. The beneficent coming of age may be 
as the dew of the Spirit falling upon the life. As 
the ideals of youth palled and vanished, so may the 
ideals that succeeded them, and the man come back 
to the ideals of life as a thing spiritually understood. 
He may come out of the experience of the Eccle- 
siast with powers purified and chastened, not to find 
all the work of man vanity and vexation of the 
spirit, but to find it the medium of the vision of 
God. God is in the stone-strewn desert of middle 
age though he saw it not, and missed the vision of 
the ladder set up to heaven. But if we fail to find 
God there, he has other ways to reach us and other 
visions to send, and one may break upon our sight 
in the very heart of the sunset. 

It is because of the enduring power of life that 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 287 

we are enabled to hope for many souls in whom, 
for the present, we can see small signs of any spirit- 
ual quality at all. The seed hidden for centuries 
in the wrappings of the mummy which may spring 
and grow and be fruitful when it is planted in the 
earth, is a symbol of the dormant grace of the sac- 
raments which abides in the soul, ready once more 
to vivify it if we give it place. We spend endless 
time and labor in training each generation of the 
young, well knowing that after a few years our 
work will seem lost and our labor vain. We know 
that in many cases, perhaps the majority, the world 
will grasp them and that they will be sucked into 
the whirlpool of sensuality, swept away by the 
tides of passion, sunk to the level of the Christless 
life of those whom their work in the world will 
give them for companions. They will be unable to 
bear the strain of loneliness, "of being peculiar," of 
standing outside of the daily habits of their society. 
This is inevitable, considering the moral and spirit- 
ual weakness of the immature. But we trust to the 
seed that we have sown, the abiding power of 
the Life that waits and watches. After long years, 
it may be, the world-weary or sin-weary man or 
woman comes back to the sacraments. After long 
neglect the baptized find their way to the confes- 
sional. For God waits long and works through 



288 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

many ways and the weariness of worldliness and 
the satiety of success are among them : 

"Let him be rich and weary, that at least 
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness 
May toss him to my breast." 

Although our Lord never experienced this sus- 
pended animation of the soul, he understood it and 
sympathized with those who were suffering from it. 
In those parables which deal with the finding of lost 
things such a state of things seems to be in his mind. 
The sheep that has strayed still belongs to the flock. 
The coin that is lost is still in the house. The hope 
of recovery is therefore great. To us, many a h'fe 
seems spiritually hopeless, where there is, no doubt, 
a basis for God's hope. We are all too prone to 
assume that the state of souls is what we see it to 
be. But there are many souls with which God has 
hidden dealings : he brings the pressure of his life 
to bear upon them in ways that we cannot follow. 
We discover sometimes that God has been keeping 
his hold upon the soul where we had thought all in- 
tercourse was ended. There is no more dangerous 
judgment than the judgment that we pass on the 
spiritual state of man. It turns out that the man 
whom we had thought to have abandoned all belief 
is still saying his prayers, is day by day committing 
his life to the love and mercy of God. That 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 289 

woman whom we thought altogether given over to 
the world, it appears has never wholly given up the 
sacraments. That, you say, may be simply the sur- 
vival of old habits which there has not been the 
energy or courage to break with. Possibly : but is 
it not also possible that these survivals are still 
points of vital contact with God ? That they repre- 
sent a hold, however slight, still maintained by the 
divine life? We, quite unconsciously, no doubt, 
fall into the way of imposing our ecclesiastical sys- 
tems upon God; but even so far as they represent 
the will of God they are but directive of our action, 
and not limitations upon God's action. Let us be 
sure that the love of God and the Life of God pene- 
trate to places where we find it difficult to conceive 
its entrance, and have dealings with the souls that 
to our eyes are altogether separate from God. May 
this thought be to us a basis of hopefulness and un- 
tiring prayer. 

When we find our own spiritual life losing some- 
thing of its buoyancy, growing dim and tarnished 
by its contacts with the unspiritual, our attitude to- 
ward ourselves should be quite different from that 
that we assume toward others. We need to deal 
with ourselves with severity, noting the first incur- 
sions of sloth and self-indulgence. We perhaps 
sometimes say to ourselves that this perpetual 
struggle to maintain the brightness of our spiritual 
(20) 



29° THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

life, this constant exertion against the inroad of the 
tempting world, is disheartening : we need, at least, 
times of distraction and rest. But if we have 
seriously entered upon the spiritual life as the train- 
ing of the spiritual man in Christ Jesus, that can only 
be a passing mood. The work of evolution is un- 
ceasing; and when the spiritual creature ceases to 
advance it begins to degenerate. Struggle is the 
evidence of persistent life; and what we need to 
find in ourselves is the evidence of that life seek- 
ing its due expression, of which the sense of 
struggle is symptomatic. For remember the re- 
currence of a clouded condition of soul does not 
imply any weakening of the power of God, any 
withdrawal of the divine presence. This morning, 
as I write, the triumphant August sun is pouring 
its streams of heat and light and energy upon the 
world, and the streets throb with the intense heat 
and the lake quivers and sparkles as myriads of 
silver stars dance on the pale blue of its surface. 
This afternoon all may be changed; clouds may 
cover the face of the sky and the streets be gray 
and the lake a sheet of sombre lead. It will seem 
as though the power of the sun were lessened; 
but is not; that is only a seeming. So the clouds 
may cover the sky of our lives, clouds that rise 
out of our passions, our weaknesses, our pride or 
sloth. And we, not paying much heed to the clouds 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 2$v. 

at their coming, but thinking of our own symptoms,, 
say that the power of Christ is growing less in our 
lives. But the real power of Christ is not lessened. 
It shines on there behind the clouds. What the 
clouds do is to hinder its activity on us, they ob- 
struct the rays. The failure is our failure of re- 
sponse, due to the distraction and dissipation of 
our energies. Dispel the clouds by energetic ac- 
tion and you will find Christ what he always has 
been, the infinite source of energy. 

As we turn from our personal struggles for the 
perfecting of our spiritual lives that the power of 
our union with our Lord may more and more per- 
vade us, to consider those lives as merged in and 
become part of the general life of the Church, we 
understand that the presence of the Living Christ 
at the Right Hand of the Father is the earnest and 
pledge of the final success of the Church. How- 
ever its fortunes may seem clouded its essential 
life is secure and its future will manifest the per- 
fect expression of that life. The power by which 
it lives is not the slowly exhausted power which we 
find behind purely human movements, that run 
their course and die because of the finitude of the 
energy that generated and supports them. The life 
of the Church is the life of its Risen Head. The 
Church is at any time an imperfect expression of 
that life — sometimes its expression of it seems al- 



«9 2 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

most to fail. But the Church is always capable of 
revival because it is capable of drinking anew from 
the infinite fountain of its life. Human life organ- 
ized in societies runs its course and exhausts itself 
in special social forms, and then new forms have 
to be created, through revolution or otherwise. The 
destruction of the one form is the birth-throes of 
the next. But there is endless vitality in the Body 
of Christ. Empires rise and fall ; nations grow and 
perish; and they will continue so to do. But the 
Church remains, remains organically one, through 
its union with its Risen Master, though to our weak 
vision it is shattered and ready to perish. Nations 
pass and languages become dead, but whatever the 
nation or language there is always the priest who 
offers the holy sacrifice and distributes the Angelic 
Food. Sciences and philosophies, the human ways 
of looking at the universe, change from generation 
to generation, and present new formulas; but the 
priest at the altar continues and will continue, till 
the last hour strikes, to say, "I believe in God." You 
cannot kill Christianity because you cannot kill 
Christ. He has passed beyond the reach of death, 
and "behold he is alive forever more." Alive : and 
On the other side of death. "I am he that liveth 
and was dead." 

Christianity is the life of Christ in human souls 
knitting those souls into union with himself. You 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 293 

can kill the life of this or that soul ; you can destroy 
the religion of this or that nation; as you can kill 
this or that tree in the forest or strip the whole 
hillside bare ; but when spring comes, nature, that is 
God, will clothe the hillside with a new life, which 
yet is not new, but a new manifestation of the one 
Life that is always in the world. You cannot kill 
Christianity because it is the self-expression of God. 
Atheists are of artificial manufacture and have no 
power of self-transmission. We need never fear for 
the life of the Church, but only for our fidelity in 
the manifestation of it. 

The self-expression of our Lord in the life of the 
universe takes many forms. The Church which is 
his Body is the most complete of these. But where* 
ever there is truth, or beauty, or goodness, these 
must be referred to the action of his Spirit — that di- 
vine Spirit that proceedeth from the Father and 
from him. We cannot afford to be negligent of 
these forms of his self-expression. I want, for a 
moment, to dwell upon these because I have before 
this spoken of them from the point of view of their 
imperfections and weaknesses. I would not, for ex- 
ample, have anything that I have said in regard to 
philanthropy and the service of society be under- 
stood in depreciation of such forms of human ac- 
tivity. I am very clear that as substitutes for the 
religion of Christ, as forms of activity proposed as 



1 94 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

containing all that is essential in Christianity and as 
the probable successors of "The dying Church," 
they necessarily arouse Christian opposition. But 
such presentation of them is quite needless, it ought 
to be possible to carry on works for the social bet- 
terment of man, without at the same time making 
loud boasting of their superiority to Christianity 
and depreciatory remarks about "The Churches." 
It is one of the discouraging notes of the little- 
ness and infirmity of human nature that it seems 
incapable of undertaking any work without a sense 
of superiority and vain-glory, which arouse quite 
unnecessary antagonism. The impulse to philan- 
thropy and social service ought to be generated, and 
is generated, wherever the Spirit of Christ works. 
It has always been generated within the Christian 
Church, as witness, to touch only one feature of its 
action, the numberless institutions of beneficence 
with which it has covered the face of the Christian 
world. And this same Spirit which has inspired 
the humanitarian action of the Church, is visible 

r 

in humantarian action everywhere, even where it 
pointedly detaches itself from the Church. But it 
is no less the Spirit of Christ that is working and it 
is no less the Spirit of Christ that works in nations 
which have never heard of him. Let us be glad 
when we find evidences of that Spirit among Japan- 
ese and Mohammedans. Let us welcome it among 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 295 

non-sectarian groups and ethical culture societies. 
We constantly meet men and women who have 
abandoned what they regard as the narrowness of 
"theological systems" to give themselves utterly to 
good works. Let us dwell, not on what we are 
obliged to think their mistakenness, but upon the 
Spirit of the master which finds so much response 
in their lives. Oftentimes they afford us an object 
lesson of single heartedness and zeal and sacrifice 
which we would do well to lay to heart. If we are 
unable to go all the way with them in theory, we 
can at least sympathise with them in practice, and 
feel that they, too, have their mission — a mission 
of carrying the Spirit of Christ to places and to 
souls that we have been unable to reach. It is to 
our shame that we have not done so. Let us not 
look with disfavor on those who are doing what we 
have left undone. The spirit that seeks to aid any 
of Christ's little ones who are hard-pressed and 
buffeted in the battle of life, is altogether admir- 
able and altogether his, even when mistaking him 
and its own origin it seeks to show its own in- 
dependence of him. 

So it is in the ways of thought. We should wel- 
come all honest attempts to solve the problems 
which human life presents. We who are Christians 
and adhere to the dogmatic system of the Church 
are ever too ready to denounce those who are seek- 



*9 6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ing truth on other lines and by other means. We 
are apt to assume that our interpretation of Chris- 
tianity and Christianity are necessarily coincident. 
What we believe about the Bible is too often in 
our thought the same thing as the meaning of God 
in Holy Scripture. We therefore look with suspicion 
upon the devoted scholars who have reached con- 
clusions in the matter of Biblical learning which are 
not what we have been accustomed to believe. They 
may indeed be mistaken, but so may we. There are 
a great many questions that we may ask to which 
there are no answers. Possibly answers may be 
found for them some day, or perhaps not; but in 
the meantime, it is well to wait patiently, with an 
open mind. It is well to remember too, that the 
confidence with which critics and specialists put 
forward conclusions is no measure of their truth. 
Immature and unpracticed minds are thrown into 
a state of unrest when they find that the universe 
is larger than our knowledge of it. This is especi- 
ally true when they find that the Church has no 
ready-made answers for all the new problems which 
emerge as the result of man's persistent questioning 
of the world and life. If the Church is the Custo- 
dian of revealed truth and has authority to declare 
it, then, such seems to be their inference, it ought 
to put an end to intellectual unrest, at least within 
its own borders. If there emerge differences of 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 297 

opinion in matters of belief and practice within 
the Church, the Church ought to settle the ques- 
tions at once, by the voice of authority. But the 
authority of the Church is authority to declare 
and teach the faith, which it sufficiently does 
through its creeds and liturgy. The faith that it 
declares and teaches is the faith committed to it. 
It has no power or commission to go beyond that 
either in making new articles of faith or develop- 
ing new dogmas from theological germs. The au- 
thority of the Church is not at all like the heathen 
oracles which provided answers for perplexed 
questioners on all matters under the sun. The fas- 
cination that the Roman Church exercises over 
many minds lies in its pretensions to possess this 
oracular power. Of course controversies are not, 
and cannot be, settled by any such short and easy 
method. It is possible for ecclesiastical authority 
to suppress discussion within the limits of its own 
jurisdiction, but, even so, nothing is really settled, 
and the pursuit of truth goes on until conclusions 
are reached or the search abandoned as hopeless. 
The authority of the Church is not to declare all 
truth, but authority to teach that special body of 
truth which is contained in the Christian revelation. 
When it is objected to the Anglican church that 
it lacks authority, there is a confusion in the mind 
of the objector as to the meaning of authority. 



f 98 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

The Anglican church has and has exercised the 
authority which properly belongs to the Church in 
setting forth clearly and definitely the Christian 
revelation in its creeds and formulas of worship. 
This is a proper exercise of authority; and, inas- 
much as it does not claim to be the whole Church, 
it does not attempt to exercise that authority to 
formulate credal statements which it belongs only 
to the whole church, assembled in general 
council, to formulate. Neither does it feel 
under obligation to accept such statements 
when formulated by any other part of the 
Church. There is indeed no evidence that the faith 
of the Church needs any further developed state- 
ment than it has received. The faith Christendom 
has lived by from the earliest times is adequate to 
the needs of our time. There would seem to be no 
ground for the Church to abandon its conception 
of its obligation to teach the faith committed to it, 
and embark on a career of question-answering for 
the sake of relieving its children from the difficulty 
of making up their own minds, or in the vain hope 
that it will thereby still controversies. But what is, 
in fact, meant when the lack of authority of the 
Anglican Church is spoken of, is not this authority 
to state the faith, but something quite other: that 
is, its failure to enforce dicipline to the extent that 
critics think desirable. "You can never be certain 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 299 

that the teaching of any two Anglican parishes will 
be alike." 

It can, of course, be truly answered that in all 
Anglican churches the same faith is taught — taught 
authoritatively by the creeds and liturgy. This 
teaching is the teaching of the Church, and it is well 
to stress that point. It removes the reproach that 
the Church teaches error. What, however, is in the 
objector's mind is that the Church tolerates teach- 
ing in the pulpit that is contrary to its own teach- 
ing in its formularies; in other words, it does not 
enforce discipline. That, no doubt, is perfectly true. 
But it is not self-evident, as the objector seems to 
think it is, that rigid enforcement of discipline is 
the mark of a standing or falling Church. The ill 
results that follow laxity of discipline are sufficiently 
evident. They produce, no doubt, much perplexity 
in the minds of people who put all truths on the same 
plane, and are unable to distinguish between what 
belongs to the Catholic faith and what does not; 
and are unable to distinguish between the teach- 
ings of the Church and the opinions of an individual. 
But are the evils greater than those that result from 
such rigidity of discipline as prevents men from 
thinking at all, or daring to say what they think; 
and unfits them to deal with the new problems of life 
and thought which are continually arising? Al- 
though at times we may be vexed or disheartened 



300 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

or ashamed by the unrebuked utterances of some 
member of the Anglican communion; though at 
times we may find very practical difficulties arise 
from the existence of widely diverging opinions, 
yet we are infinitely better so, than reduced to a 
dead level of thoughtless uniformity. After all, 
differences which are felt to be important are the 
evidence of interest and life. The conviction that it 
has got hold of an important truth, has the effect, 
it would seem, of injecting into the human system 
a stimulant that arouses the spirit of combativeness ; 
we could desire that it would rather arouse the 
spirit of charity; but as human nature is, so must 
we take it. 

And we have this truth for our comfort: that 
the Christian Church is not a human debating so- 
ciety working to its own ends, but the manifestation 
of the kingdom of God on earth. Its Living Head 
is presiding over its fortunes and his Spirit is guid- 
ing it to its consummation. We have long ago got 
rid of the notion that what God works through 
must be perfect, or that what he creates must be 
without blot. Flawlessness and stainlessness are 
attributes of the finished work, not of the work in 
its formative state. We have only to read over 
these Epistles of the Ascended Christ — he that is 
living after death — to understand how his work 
goes on under the conditions of human imperfec- 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD 301 

tions. It is as true as it is trite to say, that it is 
just because of our imperfections that the work 
of the Incarnation exists. The imperfections in the 
working of a system are no ground for doubt of 
its truth. In the matter of imperfection the di- 
visions of Christendom are not well occupied in 
throwing stones at one another. We are much 
better occupied in working diligently under the con- 
ditions in which we find ourselves in the hope that 
fidelity to the truth we see will result in a large 
measure of revelation; and that honest work for 
God's kingdom will hasten the time when it shall 
finally come. That coming will not be hastened 
by those who seek through emphasis on our di- 
vision to stir up strife. It will not be hastened 
by those who pretend that divisions are of no im- 
portance. But it will be hastened by those who, 
feeling with intensity the importance of truth and 
the beauty of charity, seek to hold the one in the 
bonds of the other. 

In spite of our divisions, our narrowness, our 
lack of charity, our anxiety for the triumph of our 
opinions rather than truth, we are members of 
God's Church and witnesses of his working. He 
who so over-ruled the bitter divisions of the early 
Church so as to make it the instrument of the set- 
ting forth of his revelations and the conversion of 
Europe, can still work through us and our divisions 



303 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

to a further advance in his kingdom. He is doing 
so in the notable conquests in the mission field. 
Perhaps it is by the new churches of the mission 
field that many of the problems that we have not 
been able to solve will gain their solution. The new 
Christians of China and Japan and India will surely 
not, with Christianity, take over the teasing ec- 
clesiastical problems in which we have entangled 
ourselves. They can hardly be expected to spend 
much time or energy upon the opinions of Cranmer 
or the Caroline divines. Our not very dignified 
squabbles about the "change of name" can hardly 
interest them. The field is free for them to accept 
the faith once delivered to the saints as it was de- 
livered, and not as it has been obscured by the con- 
troversies of the Reformation period, which have 
gone very dead — only that we find their ghosts 
still haunt us. They do not have to take up the 
battle-cries of present parties, and insist on the 
maintenance of now meaningless names, out of 
loyalty to their grandfathers. Christianity, in its 
march from West to East, can well leave behind 
much of the baggage it has accumulated from hu- 
man sources. If the Reformation was the washing of 
the face of the Church, it has accumulated dust 
and grime enough in the centuries since to justify 
another lustration. Perhaps it is not too much to 
hope, remembering who is the true Ruler of the 



I AM HE THAT LIVETH AND WAS DEAD $0$ 

fortunes of the kingdom, that there will come a 
day when Peter will be converted, and set himself 
to strengthening his brethren, in place of abusing 
and harrowing them. It is well to stay ourselves, 
at any rate, with such hope; and cultivate a vision 
that can penetrate beyond the smoke of our con- 
flicts, which tend to obscure the universe for us, 
to the serene life where the Head of the Church is 
enthroned in the power of his Risen Life at the 
Right Hand of the Father. No doubt the time 
seems long, and we weary of the continual shouting, 
"I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; 
and I of Christ. ,? We grow faint while the di- 
visions of Christendom glory in men and in eccles- 
iastical systems. But the words of the same Apostle 
who first was made sick with this human pettiness 
comfort us as they did his loyal followers: "Let 
no man glory in men. For all things are yours: 
whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, 
or life or death, or things present, or things to 
come: all are yours; and you are Christ's; and 
Christ is God's.'* 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA. 

Let us listen to the words of our Lord — 
I am Alpha and Omega. 

And, let us picture — 

B COMMON scene. It is a bed-room that we 
are looking at ; and on the bed there is lying 
a mother clasping to her breast her first- 
barn child. How she has dreamed over this coming 
child in the months that have passed. With what 
care she has prepared for its coming; and now, the 
hour of her anguish passed, she rejoices that a man 
is born into the world. See the love-light in her 
eyes; see her delight in every movement of the 
child. This thing, which has happened to every 
mother for unnumbered centuries, is to her a new 
miracle. If we could see into her soul, what dreams 
and hopes and plans we should see there; how she 

805 
(21) 



306 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

looks out into the future and sees this child growing 
true and brave and pure answering to all her ideals 
of manliness. Sometimes, too, we should see fears 
there — fears lest she should be unequal to the task 
before her, fear lest the malign forces of life 
should lay hold of and ruin her child. As we watch 
her with this being, all-unconscious of its future, 
lying on her breast, we wonder, not only what the 
future is to be, but what is the kind of love that is 
going to play so great a part in the shaping of that 
future. Is it the passion of a personal possession, 
or the awe of a great trust. Is she quite sure that 
God has trusted her with a life that is immortal to 
be trained for him? Are the visions that fill her 
mind, visions of a life that finds its meaning only 
when at length it shall walk, white-robed, by the 
side of the river of the water of life, clear as crys- 
tal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of 
the Lamb? 

'Consider, first — 

That a child is an immortal being whose eternal 
destinies are being shaped by the influences that are 
brought to bear on it during the time of its living 
here. This child has been fashioned under the 
laws of God, that we commonly call the laws of 
nature. It comes into the world with tendencies 
that are the work of the past, tendencies that, with- 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 307 

in limits, its parents have had under their control. 
They have transmitted to it something of what they 
themselves are — their health, their passions, their 
good and evil. They know from their own lives 
the elements of the problem that they have to deal 
with, the factors that need to be eliminated, the 
weaknesses that need to be made strong. They 
are not entering upon the task of this child's nature 
in blindness; it is their child, to be trained in the 
light of its heredity. But God is in its present. 
It is not merely the resultant of forces that are be- 
yond control; it is subject to forces that they may 
themselves control. They have it in their power to 
select, in great measure, the forces and influences 
that shall determine the child's future. They live 
in a spiritual universe, and are members of a re- 
deemed race. They have the revelation of the will 
of God. God has placed at their disposal the gifts 
and graces which will enable them to bring this 
child up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. 
In the light of their knowledge of themselves and of 
God's will they may mould the character of this 
child. There are, no doubt, forces beyond their 
control, but they are not beyond the control of God ; 
if they do their part as his representatives. Before 
the child passes under the control of forces that 
escape them, there have been years of training and 
discipline which must leave an indelible impress. 



|o8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

Consider, second — 

What this impress will be will depend on their 
own wisdom, no doubt; but will depend also, in 
great measure, on the sort of belief that they have 
in God. Is God Alpha and Omega to them, the 
Beginning and the End ? There is the question that 
is before all things critical. Have they a burning, 
energetic faith in God ? It is one thing to bring up 
a child for the purposes of this world, and a quite 
different thing to bring it up as one whose life finds 
its significance in its eternal relation to God. In 
the one case the life will be shaped for the attain- 
ment of immediate and temporary ends ; in the 
other for the attainment of ends that can only be 
realized in another life. Though the things to be 
done in the way of external living may be much the 
same in both cases, the emphasis will be entirely 
different, the values sought through activity will 
be unlike. In the one case the gifts of God will be 
valued for themselves, in the other they will be 
sought as instruments of ministry. Think of your- 
self as that child, now grown and come to the 
fruition of life. What does the life that you are 
leading mean to you? I? it a life of which God is 
the beginning, the middle and the end? Is God 
Alpha and Omega? Have you a living experience 
of him as the Lord from whom your life proceeds, 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 309 

and toward whom it is tending? Is your life select- 
ed, as to its elements, with reference to its final 
realization as a life of another world, where God 
shall be all in all? If God is not the Alpha, the 
ground of our lives here, he will not be the Omega, 
the consummation of our lives hereafter. All our 
Lord's will for us has reference to this, that we 
should so live his life here that we may live with 
him in the future. On his throne in heaven he is 
waiting to receive us. 

Let us, then, pray — 

That our lives may be rooted and grounded in 
him. Let us pray that we may hold the things of 
this life at their true valuation, as means of our 
development into his likeness. 

O God, who hast prepared for those who love 
thee such good things as pass man's understanding; 
Pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that 
we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy 
promises, which exceed all that we can desire; 
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

Our spiritual life is established in the possession 
of God. It is consummated in the enjoyment of God. 
When our Lord says that he is Alpha and Omega 
he is attributing to himself the title which is the 
proper possession of God — he is declaring his owi* 



310 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

divinity. And as he is Alpha and Omega to us 
his assertion of divinity becomes the assurance of 
our spiritual stability. 

This title of our Lord is accompanied by the ex- 
planation : "which is, and which was, and which is 
to be." It is this that is declared of our Lord else- 
where: "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day 
and forever." The promises on which faith and 
hope rest are guaranteed by his unchangeableness. 

He is he which was. In the background of hu- 
man history there has been a divine purpose work- 
ing toward its end in the redemption of the race. 
Human life has not been a meaningless drift out 
of nothingness into nothingness ; there has been pur- 
pose from the beginning. If we try to trace the 
wanderings of humanity through the wilderness of 
this world it is a strangely broken and twisted path 
that we have to follow. The evolution of the spirit- 
ual man is not a straight and easy march along the 
King's highway from the city of this world to the 
city of God. There are twists and turns, advances 
and retreats, recoveries and relapses. But the thing 
that on the whole has emerged from age to age is 
an advance in spiritual capacity and interest — a di- 
rection of the whole process forward. That, most 
likely, would seem a saying hard to justify, to many 
observers of our time. Our own time, they will 
tell us, whatever its greatness in certain respects, 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 31* 

can hardly be said to show any marked advance in 
spirituality. But one is apt to be led into a pessi- 
mistic observation of our own time because of cer- 
tain superficial indications which fill up the fore- 
ground of vision. There is no doubt much to dis- 
hearten. I have perhaps dwelt sufficiently, in the 
preceding meditations, upon such disheartening 
features of our time to make it clear that I do not 
overlook them. Frivolity, worldliness, the lust of 
amusement, indifference to the deeper, issues of life, 
alienation from religion, the assertion of a false 
freedom — all these and more are on the surface of 
things, and are abundantly discouraging. But in 
fact they are the ever-present phenomena of man's 
littleness, visible in all times and places of his 
history. The restless spirit of man beating against 
the limitations that are imposed upon it by circum- 
stances and striving to escape them generates the 
phenomena of lawlessness and self-asserting pride 
which is its form of protest against the restraints 
it cannot escape. The imprisoned sea, whipped by 
the wind, dashes itself to foam against the unyield- 
ing rocks. And the lawless and reckless dissipa- 
tions of human beings are as the foam of life 
whipped by desires it has not learned to control. 
We are like children, set to learning lessons, who 
rebelliously waste their time in throwing their books 



3 1 « THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

about. But this is no new thing — it is as old as 
the world. 

More seriously, our troubles are the result of an 
achieved liberty that we have not yet learned to use. 
It is difficult to estimate the profound dislocation 
and unsettlement which has resulted from the 
triumph of a democratic ideal. We have been made 
free with a freedom which we do not understand 
and are as yet unable effectively to use. The dis- 
appearance of external authority has not been fol- 
lowed by the emergence of any authoritative prin- 
ciple as the ruling power in life. Freedom still re- 
mains for us, license, and the supremacy of our 
own wills. As a whole we have been engaged this 
century or more in the attempt to impose our own 
will on others in the name of freedom. Authority 
is the imposition of an external will as a limit and 
guide to our action. It was no right reading of 
freedom which substituted for ancient forms of au- 
thority, the authority of a majority. True freedom 
means the imposition of limitation upon our own 
will for the good of the whole. It means sacrifice 
of self to the highest principle we can find. In the 
present clash of the wills of parties and classes, 
striving by any means to gain their own ends, 
whatever else we have we have not freedom in any 
real understanding of it. Our democracy is at 
present generating and upholding what would seem 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 3*3 

to be the worst tyranny yet seen — the tyranny of or- 
ganized groups and interests bent upon the exploita- 
tion of the community in favor of their own per- 
sonal gain. It is difficult to see that we have made 
any advance in the exchange of former tyrannies 
for the present ones, whether they be political or 
industrial. 

But there begin to emerge hopeful factors in the 
situation, which would seem to indicate that pro- 
gress is not merely our optimistic human way of 
conceiving things, but a real advance. We are get- 
ting rid of the cock-sureness which has been so 
characteristic of the last century. We are less ex- 
pectant that all good things come to those who vote. 
Though we still permit the formation of predatory 
groups, organized to prey upon the rest of the so- 
ciety, we are less certain that they represent the last 
words of economic wisdom. We even begin to 
seek for means by which they can be controlled. 
We are not so sure that everything that is woith 
doing, can be done by money and machinery. We 
are getting beyond the social philosophy which re- 
gards social ills as things that "just happen." and 
for which nobody is responsible, and are growing a 
conscience which is markedly uneasy. To be sure 
our present analysis of the causes of social ills does 
not inspire confidence; but that we have begun to 



3*4 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

suspect that there is such a thing as social responsi- 
bility is important. 

Moreover, we seem to have outlived materialism, 
as a philosophy at any rate ; and are coming to the 
conviction that the foundations of life are spiritual. 
Mechanical views of the universe are giving way 
to spiritual ones. There is hope, therefore, that we 
shall before long recognize the power of spiritual 
motive and the supremacy of spiritual ideal. 
The appeal for spiritual activity will get 
listened to ; and when spiritual appeal can gain 
attention as not traversing "the common sense view 
of life,"we can hope for a programme of spiritual 
religion. At present, no doubt, the emphasis is still 
upon an unspiritual religion — a religion which 
makes only such demands upon life as can be met by 
worldly people without a change of life. I listened 
not long ago to a sermon which appeared to teach 
the perfectness of our present industrial system, and 
left on one the impression that the only person 
whose money-getting could be held blameable was 
the office boy who robbed his employer's till. The 
prosperous gentlemen in the pews seemed to sit up 
with a proper sense of their probity — but on the 
whole the sermon had an archaic sound, even to- 
day. The day seems coming when once more we 
can feel that neither circumcision profiteth anything 
nor uncircumcision : when neither capital nor labor, 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 315 

wealth nor poverty, will be canonized: but the life 
of the spirit, possible under all outward conditions, 
will be valued as the proper aim of men. Surely 
it is only then that we shall attach any intelligible 
meaning to the creation — when we read the purpose 
of God in creating man as the purpose of lifting 
man into union with himself. I believe that there 
is visible a distinct advance toward an appreciation 
of spiritual ideals of life, and that in that advance 
we can see the accomplishment of the purpose of 
him who was, and still is, life's background. 

For he is he which is. And whatever our failure 
to acknowledge him and, in our self-sufficiency, 
think that we can manage our own life, and shape 
society for the best, he is still energetic in the affairs 
of the world. "My father worketh hitherto, and I 
work." The purpose of God in bringing all things 
to him may seem frustrated by human sin and 
stupidity, but we have the lesson of the Cross to 
teach us that it is not so. That Cross surely teaches 
that the self-will and sin of man cannot cancel the 
purpose of God ; that as often as men in what they 
deem their hour of triumph have raised God upon a 
cross, there he reigns; that is a sufficient answer 
to all our timorous doubting and despair of the city 
of God. God reigns from the Tree. God reigned 
in the city of Herod and Caiaphas and Pilate ; and 
God reigns in the city of this world to-day. None 



Jl6 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of the dark things that happen in the world to-day 
can shake our faith in that fact. Jesus Christ who 
was crucified on Friday walked the streets of Jeru- 
salem on Sunday morning. Let the outlook in 
Church and state be as bad as they will, they will 
never be worse than they were when the Cross was 
raised. They can never be darker than they were 
when the sun set on that first Good Friday. When 
the supernatural darkness, which was the symbol of 
the earth's godlessness wrapped the streets of Jeru- 
salem, God still reigned. We need waste no time 
in lamentations on the state of the world ; what we 
have to fear is that when the darkness of this world 
passes we be found otherwhere than beside the 
Cross of Christ. We need to fear lest we despair 
of his cause, and go back to our homes, thinking 
that God is dead. Your place and mine is beside 
the Cross though all, even the disciples, forsake 
him and flee. There is a divine purpose realizing 
itself in the world, and we must be found on the 
side of that purpose : we must be found going after 
him, bearing whatever crosses it is his will that we 
should bear. There is no harder or heavier Cross 
for us than to maintain our loyalty in a society that 
has abandoned God, whether it is the abandonment 
of open revolt, or the worse abandonment of merely 
nominal service. It is not so hard to stand in the 
ranks with an open enemy at your face, as it is to> 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 317 

stand there with the consciousness that the man at 
your side may be but half-hearted, or even a traitor. 
We cannot deny that there is a strain upon us to* 
day "when we speak with our enemies in the gate" 
— the strain that comes from not knowing whether 
they are faithful who stand behind us. But the 
Cross that we bear is Christ's Cross, and 
the shadows through which we bear it will 
break, and the dawn of Easter will come, and 
we who have gone after him to Calvary shall see 
him once more in the power of his Resurrection and 
shall watch him ascend to his Father and ours, and 
shall be lifted with him to his unpassing peace. He 
which is, is the guarantee of our triumph. 

For he is, also, he which is to be. There is a fu- 
ture in which the as yet unaccomplished purpose of 
God will gain its fulfillment. We do not look back 
with tear-filled eyes to an Eden from which we 
have been banished, but onward to a kingdom yet 
in its fullness to be revealed. If we have lived the 
lives of Christians we have lived them in the con- 
sciousness of the divine guidance. God has been 
with us and we know it, and that he will not fail us 
now. When his full purpose is unveiled — that 
purpose which now in dark days we are tempted 
to despair of, we shall be sharers of his triumph. 
We shall stand by him and see the unfolding glory 
of God. We shall be citizens of a new heaven and 



3 I 8 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. The 
spiritual life which we enter upon here moves for- 
ward to that consummation. It began here with the 
possession of God, or, perhaps we might better say, 
with God's possession of us. But we move slowly 
to the perception and understanding of this so tre- 
mendous fact. 

What we first consiously experience is not God, 
but the gifts of God — the bounty of his Providence, 
As soon as we begin to distinguish the elements of 
our experience and seek their sense, we are led to 
assign as the source of some of them the immediate 
action of God. We learn to listen to his guiding 
voice as it is made known to us in the conscience, 
we learn to look for his guidance in the events of 
life. We find his goodness active in our life from 
day to day. How many things there are over 
which we can whisper, "thank God for that," if 
only our spiritual sight is clear. It is this constant 
and close investigation of life as to the message it 
bears us that develops spiritual insight. I know 
that it can be said that this is merely fanciful — that 
we are assigning to the Providence of God what are 
merely natural events, and assuming an individual 
care of God that we have no right to postulate. You 
can easily take that view of life which ultimately 
rests on a belief, not in the care, but the careless- 
ness of God. It was my good fortune, or it befell 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 319 

me in the Providence of God, (you may read as you 
choose) to be born in the country and to pass my 
boyhood in the open air of wooded hills. Many a 
time since I have taken city-bred boys into the 
country, and have been impressed by the fact that 
their minds are an entire blank to all things of the 
woods and fields. There was hardly a tree or 
flower or bird or beasts that they could identify. 
That was inevitable when one came to think of it: 
but it seemed almost tragic. And yet not alto- 
gether inevitable: even within the limitations of a 
city life there are trees and birds and flowers. A 
beginning of experience might have been made, 
and would have been, but for a lack of interest, 
but for a mind unawakened to certain features of 
the environment. Is it not much the same in re- 
gard to the spiritual environment? That we are 
not conscious of certain things is as far as pos- 
sible from proving that they are not present. That 
we do not see any Providence of God in our lives 
does not mean that God does not provide. It is 
altogether a matter of awakened interest. A man 
without interest in the action of God in life, and 
with a negative experience, is not a witness against 
the truth of God's intervention in life — he 
simply has no testimony to give. He is not a man 
on the spot who did not see what is alleged to 
have happened there; he is a man who was else- 



3*0 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

where at the time and therefore cannot be called 
as witness. 

But assuming our elementary experience of the 
gifts of God, the danger of this stage of spiritual 
development is lest we should take the possession 
of the gifts of God to be the same thing as the 
possession of God. In fact, many people stop at 
that point. The very fullness of their lives kills 
desire. They do not spiritually develop past the 
point where they recognize the good Providence of 
God with a certain measure of thankfulness. The 
very richness of God's Providence acts as a seda- 
tive to the spiritual powers. There is the beset- 
ting danger of prosperity, of a quiet and undis- 
turbed life. The gifts are accepted as rewards 
instead of being used as stimulants. It is therefore 
sometimes necessary for God to remove the gifts 
which, so far from raising our souls to seek the 
Giver, but become screens to hide him. There has 
to be a stripping bare of the life that it may per- 
ceive God. 

Or there is this other case: We may confuse 
the gifts of religion with religion itself. There 
are people in whom the sensible enjoyment of 
religion appears to take the place of spiritual ex- 
perience. They are dependent upon the reaction of 
religious practices, and begin to be weary of the 
practices, or to doubt their validity, when the sen- 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 32 I 

sible reactions cease or do not at once follow. 
Every director of souls is familiar with people who 
doubt of prayer and sacraments because they ex- 
perience no feelings in connection with them. They 
complain that they do them no good. Or one 
knows people whose interest in religion is interest 
in services or functions, which they enjoy im- 
mensely, but who are not frequenters of the sacra- 
ments. But all those things are gifts, stepping 
stones to other things, invitations to go on and find 
God. The sensible reactions of religion, the joys 
and consolations that we experience in services 
and prayers and sacraments, are still only the 
gifts of God, the effects of religion — they are not 
religion itself. They will cease after a while, and 
unless we have found God, and our religion is the 
experience of God himself, the religion that we 
thought we had will vanish too. 

We do not love God rightly until we love him for 
himself alone, not for what he gives us. As Mme. 
Guyon points out, we walk by faith, not by sight; 
and to rely on sensible emotion is still to walk by 
sight. I repeat, because it is so important; many 
fail here. They cannot get on with a religion 
which is not a sensible experience. They want to 
feel uplifted in prayer and meditation and sacra- 
ment. When the feeling is withdrawn they think 
their religion is gone too; though it is merely that 
(22) 



322 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

God is calling them to a deeper faith in himself. 
The great test of the reality of our spiritual life 
is to be found in what we can do without. God 
has not then left the soul when he withdraws the 
signs of his presence which we were accustomed 
to trust to. He is working more intimately with the 
soul, he is asking it to throw away its crutches and 
walk unaided by anything but himself. 

Apply the same test another way: is God the 
first interest in your life — the Alpha, the begin- 
ning of it? There are many grades of religion in 
our mixed experience; and there are some who 
think they are religious and are to a certain point, 
in whose lives God is not the supreme interest. 
He is subordinated to something else. Take what 
is a crucial interest — the human affections. What 
is the nature of the love that we bear to father or 
mother, husband or wife, child or friend? Have 
they any spiritual quality? How far do they enter 
within the control of our religion? How 
many marriages are there that are contracted 
from a spiritual point of view, or are spiritually 
controlled? How many families are there that 
are envisaged as spiritual entities ? Are our friend- 
ships formed with a view to the spiritual interests 
of life, and continued or broken as they minister 
to them? The answers to these questions that 
arise spontaneously in our mind no doubt tell a 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 323 

sad story in very many instances. The disfavor 
with which the Church has at all times looked upon 
mixed marriages has not been because of a human 
dread of losing its members, but because to its il- 
luminated vision it has seemed that marriage in 
which the deepest human interests are disregarded, 
in which there is no sympathy in things spiritual, 
was likely to be unstable. Affections which are 
not affections in God are badly based. They resj 
upon elements in character and experience that 
are shifting and uncertain. There would be fewer 
divorces and wrecked families, there would be 
fewer spoiled children and dangerous friendships, 
if Christian men and women insisted upon carry- 
ing their religion into all their lives and made it the 
foundation of all their actions. But our religion is 
so distressingly fragmentary — a series of acts, 
rather than a life controlled and shaped by con^ 
tinuous motive; the possession of things, rather 
than the possession of God. 

If I am God's, all that I possess is God's — a 
consecrated whole. There would be no murmuring 
at the sacrifices which religion demands if we held 
all that we have at the disposal of God. Great 
possessions are great dangers, because they push 
the will of God out of life. They tend to make 
those who have them the patrons of God and his 
Church rather than the servants. That young- 



324 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

man in the Gospel who seems forever the type of 
those who have great possessions, would no doubt 
have been willing, as someone has said, to finance 
the Galilean ministry; but he could not find it in 
liis heart to fall in behind our Lord and bear the 
Cross. Any possessions, not great ones merely, 
tend to make us timid in God's service. We at- 
tach ourselves to the gifts of God, and are all the 
time fearful lest what he has given he should resume. 
Our piteous fear of the hand of God marks our 
distance from loving him for himself, not for what 
he gives, marks the limit for our thought of sacri- 
fice. But though he ask all we have, even life 
itself, it is the asking of love. If we believe that 
God is love, why shrink from that love? 

I thought the road would be hard and bare, 

But lo ! flowers, 

Springing flowers, 
Bright flowers blossoming everywhere. 

The night, I feared, would be dark and drear, 

But lo! stars, 

Golden stars, 
Glorious, glowing stars are here! 

And my shrinking heart, set free from dread, 

Sees love — 

(Lo! it is love.) 
God's love crowning with death my head. 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 325 

Our Lord is the end of life — the Omega. He is 
the end in this sense, that in him is revealed what 
is God's thought of us. We often question what 
is God's mind for us ; but we have no need to seek* 
Jesus is not only the revelation of God, he is also 
the revelation of man. The perfection of our hu- 
man qualities is seen in him, and also their effect- 
iveness. This is of great moment in the shaping of 
our lives. It is ground into us by our semi-heathen 
education and the experience of our early years 
that there are certain qualities of character that it 
is of the last importance that we acquire if we 
are to get on in the world. After a time we dis- 
cover that it is quite another set of qualities that 
our Lord commends to us and exemplifies in his 
own life. I suppose that most of us go on believ- 
ing in the one set of qualities and practicing the 
other. The natural result is the feeling of the in- 
tense unreality of the qualities that are commended 
in the Gospel. They belong to a state of things 
in which we do not live. We hear about them in 
lessons, read in church, and sermons preached in 
pulpits, and they seem to us to belong there with 
the other ecclesiastical furnishings. We do not 
expect to meet them in shops and offices any more 
than we expect to find altars and pulpits there. 
They belong to the religious world ; and what is the 
relation of that to daily life we do not too carefully 



326 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

ask. Our work-a-day world requires qualities of 
another order; and we smile to think what would 
happen to us if we were to attempt to carry the 
Gospel qualities into that world. What, of course, 
would happen, is that we should be great Chris- 
tians, whether we succeeded or failed in the mar- 
ket-place. And we take it altogether too much for 
granted that we should fail. I fancy that we 
should not. I do not believe that the qualities of 
our Lord's human character spell failure in ordi- 
nary human life, because they are the perfect hu- 
man qualities. And there are enough Christian 
men in the business world to justify this behef. 
For the qualities are not anti-social. They are 
not as we too readily assume, the qualities of a 
hermit life. Our Lord was neither anti-social nor 
a hermit. We should not only see a reform of 
business method, but an increase of business ef- 
ficiency, if the business world were to model its 
procedure after the principles of the life of Christ. 
We should find, indeed, that many, if not all, the 
problems of commercial life, would be solved by 
the application of our Lord's teaching in every 
day living. Indeed, those many and insoluble 
problems are the direct outcome of our not living 
the life of the Gospel, in our isolation of religion 
from "practical life." The adoption of a double 
standard in any department of life means the act- 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 327 

ual living by the lower standard. That is what 
people mean when they accuse Christians of hy- 
pocrisy. They know men of the highest Chris- 
tian position whose business methods are marked 
by utter unscrupulousness. 

Our Lord is the end of our life, the ideal toward 
which we are progressing The spiritual life 
moves toward him and finds its completion in him. 
There is always a beyond in the spiritual life 
which calls and beckons. You have walked along 
woodland paths sometime, where the undergrowth 
shuts you closer and closer, and at last a wall 
of greenery appeared to bring the path to an end; 
but at the last step a turn in the path revealed it- 
self and you came out into the open way. So it is 
in the spiritual life: there are turnings, not end- 
ings — always the way leads farther and higher, 
It seems not a very great or difficult thing when 
we enter upon it, but it grows in significance from 
day to day, revealing ever new beauty to our 
charmed eye. Our eyes which are so used to dark- 
ness have to get accustomed gradually to the light. 
God cannot reveal himself to us all at once; we 
progress "from glory to glory.'' But we are drawn 
on by the vision of the Uncreated Beauty, and 
our souls thirst for the satisfaction of the Pres- 
ence of God. 

For that in us which is akin to God and is the 



328 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

medium of God's revelation of himself to us, 
seems to expand and become capable of embracing 
even more of the divine self-showing, as it is ex- 
ercised by use. What we learn of our Lord's 
beauty and goodness educates the spiritual senses 
to keener vision and surer touch; and that which 
they then see and hold becomes in its own the 
ground of a further advance. Every deepening ex- 
perience leads us to ever deeper and firmer knowl- 
edge, to more confident power of interpretation. 
Things will never open to us the divine secrets; 
they are revealed only to Lovers who press on to the 
experience. The secrets of the kingdom are hid 
from the wise and prudent, and revealed unto 
babes — unto the spiritual children whose attribute 
is love. 

"As it is not for those to speak of the beauti- 
ful things of sense who have never seen them or 
felt them beautiful — men blind from birth, let us 
suppose — in the same way those must be silent 
upon the beauty in noble pursuits who have never 
taken to themselves the beauty there is in pursuits 
and in knowledge and all this order ; nor may those 
speak of the splendor of virtue who have never 

known the face of justice beautiful 

beyond the beauty of evening and of dawn. The 
vision is only for those who see with the souPs 
sight: these, seeing, will rejoice and all awe will 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 329 

fall upon them and a trouble deeper than those 
other things could give, for now they stand before 
the Authentic Beauty. This is the spirit which 
must always wait upon beauty in any of its forms, 
wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and 
love and an awe blended with delight. The emo- 
tions may be felt for the common beauty as for 
the seer and these the soul feels in it, all souls in 
some sense, but those the more deeply that are the 
more deeply apt to this nobler love — just as all 
men feel the love of beautiful forms of body, but 
all are not urged by it equally, and those only are 
called lovers who love the most." 

It is indisputable that it is only that which is 
supremely good and beautiful that gives permanent 
satisfaction; and there is a divine restlessness in 
man that can only be stilled by the possession of 
God. "My beloved is mine and I am his" is the 
only state of rest. It is true that the majority of 
men, still spiritually unawakened, as they are, 
pass their lives in other pursuits; but even when 
they succeed in them they do not experience satis- 
faction. Men find, no doubt, a certain pleasure 
in sin, but the time comes when the sinner recog- 
nizes his state as a state of slavery. He has bound 
chains about him that he cannot break. The crav- 
ing appetites call for satisfaction, but the satisfy- 
ing of them is no longer joy — it is the compulsion 



33° THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

of bondage. The drunkard and the sensualist are 
conscious of a subjection to appetite which they 
are unable to escape from and which ruins their 
life. They no longer take up the day's dissipation 
with the exultant joy of youth, but with weariness 
and painfulness, as those upon whom a dark task- 
ing is laid. And is it not the same with the abuses 
of life that are less marked? Is there any habit 
of sin which you know of, of which you do not 
feel that the Apostles' words are true — "for of 
whom a man is overcome, of the same that he 
brought in bondage." The sinner becomes, as 
someone has expressed it, "the Laocoon of his own 
serpents," a most vivid picture of the sinner caught, 
strangled, helpless in the power of appetite he him- 
self has brought to strength. This satiety of sin, 
if it is nothing else, is the revelation of its own 
inherent unreason, of its being a blind alley in hu- 
man experience. 

On the contrary, a life that makes God its ideal 
and end is always finding that new sources of satis- 
faction are opening before it. Its possessions are 
daily increased. Its resources are not squandered, 
but grow with their use. We tire of everything 
else — we never tire of our Lord. Each new ex- 
perience of him reveals ever new riches in him. 
Each great trial of his love and mercy shows them 
inexhaustible, The more we grow in his friend- 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 331 

ship, the less we want any other consolation or 
support of joy in life. He is Alpha and Omega 
to us — our all in all. 

It is his work now to draw us to this conception 
of our life, as a life whose significance will be re- 
vealed when it attains its fullness in him. He, be- 
ing lifted, seeks to draw all men unto him. It is 
strange that believing what undoubtedly we do, he 
should find in us so much resistance; but the 
earthly self clings to the things of earth, and dies 
hard — dies harder than anything else. It remains 
distrustful and worrying, and will not abandon 
all, and taking his hand simply to go out whither- 
soever he shall lead. He rightly stressed in his 
earthly life the virtue of faith as the fundamental 
virtue, showing thereby his complete comprehen- 
sion of our nature in its weakness and its need. 
Our ever-recurring failure is just there, in faith; 
in that utter trust and self -committal to our Lord's 
will and guiding that offers no opposition to his 
drawing. We break down again and again at the 
critical moment when he was about to lead us on 
to new knowledge of his love and care. I say it 
is a failure of faith, and yet, perhaps not altogether. 
We may, at least, say the failure of a certain 
quality of faith — a failure of faith's courage. We 
believe in our Lord and we believe, too, that he 
has hitherto led us, but when he calls us to come 



33 * THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

nearer, to launch out into the deep and meet the 
unknown, courage fails. We do not want to hold 
back, but the known and the familiar cling about 
us and cry out to us not to leave them. There is 
so little courage in our following of our Lord! It 
is pitiful to see the souls that cling to the lower 
levels, not because they do not believe the saints' 
reports of the joys of the heights, but because they 
simply lack the courage to go up. You have seen 
the child, eager to follow where his father has 
gone, over the rough places, across the narrow 
plank that bridges the stream but holding back in 
sheer terror of the untried, fearing to trust his 
strength. Fearing to trust our strength — that is 
the trouble ; and forgetting that it is just our strength 
that we are not to trust, but the strength of our Lord 
himself. Are you fearful? Are you fearful that 
the strength will not hold to the end of the course? 
Are you afraid to leave all on this bank and go 
across the stream to meet him? Afraid that the 
sacrifice which he will ask will be more than you 
can make? Afraid that you will lose what you 
most value if you yield yourself utterly to him? 

Nay, deal not thus timidly and grudgingly with 
our Lord. Find the courage to put yourself wholly, 
unreservedly in his hands. He is your Alpha and 
Omega; all that you can hope for or wish is in 
him. Whatever has permanency, is unvanishing K 



I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA 333 

is there. Lay up all your treasures there. Noth- 
ing is lost that is consecrated in him. You shall 
find all there one day ; all your hallowed affections, 
all your pure ideals of life, which you feel that you 
have only partially attained here. 

There is so much that is only begun here, which 
seems to die without bearing any fruit. But we 
shall find the fruit in him, ripe and waiting. And 
we shall find more — more beyond all hope and all 
dreams: for we shall find him, the faithful and 
true. "I am he that shall be." What shall he be 
to us through all eternity! In all those ages when 
we shall see him face to face and know even as we 
are known! If we once gain any vision of him 
shall we not think that all the discipline of life is 
but a small thing so we may win Christ? Be you 
but his now, and he shall be yours forever. Find 
his love here, in the day of this life, and it will 
never leave you or fail you. 

How infinite and sweet, Thou everywhere 
And all-abounding Love, Thy service is ! 

Thou liest an ocean round my world of care, 

My petty every day; and fresh and fair 

Pour Thy strong tides through all my crevices, 

Until the silence ripples into prayer. 

That Thy full glory may abound, increase, 

And so Thy likeness shall be formed in me, 
I pray; the answer is not rest or peace, 



334 THE SELF-REVELATION OF OUR LORD 

But charges, duties, wants, anxieties, 

Till there seems room for everything but Thee, 
And never time for anything but these. 

And I should fear, but lo! amid the press, 
The whirl and hum and pressure of the day, 

I hear Thy garments sweep, Thy seamless dress, 

And close beside my work and weariness 
Discern Thy gracious form, not far away, 

But very near, O Lord, to help and bless. 

The busy ringers fly, the eyes may sec 
Only the glancing needle that they hold, 

But all my life is blossoming inwardly, 

And every breath is like a litany, 
While through each labor, like a thread of gold, 

Is woven the sweet consciousness of Thee. 



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